What does it mean for a text to be digital?

In principle, it can be replicated in perfect fidelity, and transmitted to an unlimited number of recipients worldwide, at close to zero cost. Powerful analytic tools can be brought to bear on it, and our reading of it. It can be compared against other texts, plumbed for clues as to its provenance and authorship. Each of our acts of engagement with it — whether of acquisition, reading, or annotation — can be shared with our social networks, mobilized as props in an ongoing performance of self. Above all, it becomes (to use the jargon practically unavoidable in any discussion of information technology) “platform-agnostic.” This is to say that it becomes independent, to a very great degree, of the physical medium in which it currently happens to be instantiated.

To varying degrees, these things have been true as long as words have been encoded in ones and zeroes — certainly since 1971, when Project Gutenberg was founded with the intention of digitizing as much of the world’s literature as possible, and making it all available for free. Why is it the case, then, that digital books only seem to have entered our lives in any major way in the last two or three years?

The apparently sudden arrival of the digital text likely owes something to the top-of-mind quality Amazon currently enjoys in its main markets, its name and value proposition as prominent in our awareness as those of the grocery chains, television networks or airlines we patronize — a presence it’s taken the company the better part of the last fifteen years to build up. And it surely has something to do with the widespread popular facility with the tropes and metaphors governing our engagement with digital content of all sorts that has developed over the same period of time, to the point that it’s increasingly hard to meet a grandparent inconversant with downloads, torrents and the virtues of cloud storage.

But the fundamental reason is probably that bit about platform-agnosticism. Anyone so inclined could have “engaged digital text” on a conventional computer at any point in the past forty years. But the act of reading didn’t — and maybe couldn’t — properly come into its own in the digital era until there was a platform for literature as present to the senses as paper itself, something as well-suited to the digital text as the road is to the automobile. I refer, of course, to the networked tablet.

It’s only with the widespread embrace of these devices that digital reading has become ubiquitous. Relatively inexpensive, lightweight and comfortable in the hand, capable of storing thousands of volumes, the merits of the tablet as reading environment may strike us as self-evident. But there’s another factor that underlies its general appeal, and that is the specific phenomenology of the way we manipulate reading material when using one.

We read text on a tablet as pixels, just as we would on any screen. But the ways in which we physically address and move through a body of such pixels have more in common with the behaviors we learned from books in earliest childhood than with anything we picked up in the course of later encounters with computers. This is why the post-PC tablet feels more “intuitive” to us, despite the frank novelty of the gestures we must learn in order to use it, and which no book in the world has ever afforded: the swipe, the drag, the pinch, the tap.

This is the new tactility of reading. But where there are comparatively few semantically-meaningful ways in which the reader’s hand can meet the pages of a material book, the experience of engaging a digital text with the finger is subject to a certain variability. It’s not a boundless freedom — it’s delimited on one side by technological limitations, and on the other by the choices of an interaction designer — but it does require explication.

The first order of variability is the screen medium itself. Each of the major touchscreen technologies available — resistive, capacitive, projective-capacitive, optical — imposes its own constraints on the latency and resolution with which a screen registers a touch, and therefore how long one must place one’s finger against it to turn a page or select a word for definition or a passage for annotation. Reading on a good screen feels effortless, even transparent — but particularly high latency or low resolution can easily disrupt the flow of experience, lifting the reader up and out of the text entirely.

The second is the treatment of type. As critical as it is to the legibility and emotional resonance of a text, and even at the higher resolutions now theroetically available, typography is all but invariably treated as though it had not been refined over five centuries. It still feels like we are many years and product versions away from type on the tablet rendered with the craft and care it deserves.

A third order of variability consists in the separation of content, style and interface elements inherent in contemporary application design. This means that both the meaning of gestural interactions and the treatment of the page itself can vary from environment to environment. Especially given the pressure developers are under to differentiate their products from one another, a tap in the Kindle for iPad application may not mean precisely what a tap in Readmill or Instapaper or Reeder does, or work in at all the same way.

In fact, something as simple and as basic to the act of reading as turning a page is handled differently in all of these contexts.

Originally, of course, the pagination of text was an artifact of necessity, something imposed by running a semantically continuous text across a physically discontinuous quantity of leaves. One might think, therefore, that pagination would be among the first things to go in making the leap to the digital reading environment, but contemporary applications tend to retain it as a skeuomorphism, larding down the interaction with animated page curls and sound effects.

On the Kindle proper, the reader presses a button — one for page forward, another for page back — and the entire screen blanks and refreshes as the new page loads, a transition imposed by the nature of electronic pigment. In the Kindle app, by contrast, the page slides right to left, slipping from future to present to past in a series of discrete taps.

The Instapaper application is, perhaps, truest to the nature of digital copy. It dispenses with all of this, and treats the document as one continuous environment: swipe upward when you’re ready for more. Instapaper is an acknowledgment of the text’s liberation from the constraints of crude matter. Handled this way, there’s no reason a digital text can’t return to something approximating the book’s earliest form, a scroll — in this case, one capable of unspooling without limit.

Finally, we also need to account for what it means to absorb text as a luminous projection. Marshall McLuhan drew a distinction between “light-on” media — that is, those in which content inscribed on a passive surface like paper is illuminated by an external light source — and “light-through” media, like our luminous tablets; per his insistence that medium is coextensive with message, we can assume that the selfsame text consumed in these two ways would be received differently, emotionally every bit as much as cognitively.

As it happens, I have both an actual, e-paper Kindle — digital, but nevertheless light-on — and Kindle applications for the eminently light-through iPhone and iPad. And purely anecdotally, it does seem to be the case that I have an easier time with thornier, weightier reading on the e-paper device. Novels are fine on the iPad, even on my phone…but if I want to wrestle with Graham Harman or Susan Sontag, I reach for the Kindle.

The McLuhanite in me frets that, in embracing the tablet, we inadvertently give up much of our engagement with the text. That beyond sentimentality, there is something about the act of turning a page to punctuate a thought, or the phenomenology of light reflecting off of paper saturated with ink, that conditions the act of reading and makes it what we recognize it to be, at some level beneath the threshold of conscious perception.

Which brings us back, at last, to the printed artifact. We can acknowldge that the networked tablet is a brilliant addition to any reader’s instrumentarium. I’m certain that it increases the number of times and places at which people read, and know from long, intimate and sorrowful personal experience the difference it makes where the portability of entire libraries is concerned. But it’s not quite the same thing as a book or a magazine, and cannot entirely replace them.

Curiously enough, the ambitions to which paper appears to remain best-suited are diametrically opposite:

On the one hand, deep, thoughtful engagement with a body of language, an engagement that fully leverages the craft of bookmaking. In this pursuit, the tablet cannot yet offer nearly the typographic nicety, conscious design for legibility or perceptual richness trivially available from ink on paper — all of the things, in other words, that permit the reader to immerse herself for longer, and with less strain.

But there are also occasions on which surface is all important, where the ostensible content is almost incidental to the qualities of its packaging. Here the texture or other phenomenological qualities of paperstock itself — even its smell — communicate performatively; I think of glossy lifestyle magazines. It’s hard to imagine any tablet or similar device affording these virtues in anything like the near term.

If we understand a book as a container, the precise shape that container takes ought to reflect the nature of its intended contents, and what one proposes to do with them. In acknowledging all the many virtues of networked, digital texts, the texture, tooth and heft of paper will ensure that for at least the contexts I’ve specified here, it remains irreplaceable among all the ways we contain thought as it flows from one human mind to another.

On a walk through the station with [director of "homeless outreach" Richard] Rubel and the photographer Ovie Carter one summer day in 1997…I found it essentially bare of unhoused people. I told Rubel of my interest in the station as a place that had once sustained the lives of unhoused people, and asked if he could point out changes that had been made so that it would be less inviting as a habitat where subsistence elements could be found in one place. He pointed out a variety of design elements of the station which had been transformed, helping to illustrate aspects of the physical structure that had formerly enabled it to serve as a habitat.

“This spot right over here was where a panhandler would stand. So my philosophy is, you don’t create nooks and corners. You draw people out into the open, so that your police officers and your cameras have a clean line of sight [emphasis added], so people can’t hide either to sleep or to panhandle.”

Next he brought us to a retail operation with a square corner. “Someone here can sleep and be protected by this line of sight. A space like this serves nobody’s purpose [emphasis added]. So if their gate closes, and somebody sleeps on the floor over here, they are lying undetected. So what you try to do is have people construct their building lines straight out, so you have a straight line of sight with no areas that people can hide behind.”

“Another situation we had was around the fringes of the taxi roadway. We had these niches that were open. The Madison Square Garden customers that come down from the games would look down and see a community of people living there, as well as refuse that they leave behind.” He installed a fencing project to keep the homeless from going behind corners, drawing them out into the open [emphasis added]. “And again,” said Rubel, “the problem has gone away.”

This logic, of course, is immanent in the design of a great deal of contemporary public urban space, but you rarely find it expressed quite as explicitly as it is here. Compare, as well, Jacobs (1961) on the importance to vibrant street life (and particularly of children’s opportunities for play) of an irregular building line at the sidewalk edge.

As you see it here, the section is not quite in its final form; it hasn’t yet been edited for meter, euphony or flow, and in particular, some of the arguments toward the end remain too telescoped to really stand up to much inspection. Nevertheless, given the speed at which wearable AR is evolving, I thought it would be better to get this out now as-is, to garner your comments and be strengthened by them. I hope you enjoy it.

1

One seemingly potent way of returning networked information to the world would be if we could layer it directly over that which we perceive. This is the premise of so-called augmented reality, or AR, which proposes to furnish users with some order of knowledge about the world and the objects in it, via an overlay of informational graphics superimposed on the visual field. In principle, this augmentation is agnostic as to the mediating artifact involved, which could be the screen of a phone or tablet, a vehicle’s windshield, or, as Google’s Glass suggests, a lightweight, face-mounted reticle.

AR has its conceptual roots in informational displays developed for military pilots in the early 1960s, at the point when the performance of enemy fighter aircraft began to overwhelm a human pilot’s ability to react. In the fraught regime of jet-age dogfighting, even a momentary dip of the eyes to a dashboard-mounted instrument cluster could mean disaster. The solution was to project information about altitude, airspeed and the status of weapons and other critical aircraft systems onto a transparent pane aligned with the field of vision, a “head-up display.”

This notion turned to have applicability in fields beyond aerial combat, where the issue wasn’t so much reaction time as it was visual complexity. One early AR system was intended to help engineers make sense of the gutty tangle of hydraulic lines, wiring and control mechanisms in the fuselage of an airliner under construction; each component in the otherwise-hopeless confusion was overlaid with a visual tag identifying it by name, and colored according to the system it belonged to.

Other systems were designed to help people manage situations in which both time and the complexity of the environment were sources of pressure — for example, to aid first responders in dispelling the fog and chaos they’re confronted with upon arrival at the scene of an emergency. One prototype furnished firefighters with visors onto which structural diagrams of a burning building were projected, along with symbols indicating egress routes, the position of other emergency personnel, and the presence of electric wiring or other potentially dangerous infrastructural elements.

The necessity of integrating what were then relatively crude and heavy cameras, motion sensors and projectors into a comfortably wearable package limited the success of these early efforts — and this is to say nothing of the challenges posed by the difficulty of establishing a reliable network connection to a mobile unit. But the conceptual heavy lifting done to support these initial forays produced a readymade discourse, waiting for the day augmentation might be reinstantiated in smaller, lighter, more capable hardware.

That is a point we appear to have arrived at with the advent of the smartphone. As we’ve seen, the smartphone handset can be thought of as a lamination together of several different sensing and presentation technologies, subsets of which can be recombined with one another to produce distinctly different ways of engaging networked information. Bundle a camera, accelerometer/gyroscope, and display screen in a single networked handset, and what you have in your hands is indeed an artifact capable of sustaining rudimentary augmentation. Add GPS functionality and a three-dimensional model of the world — either maintained onboard the device, or resident in the cloud — and a viewer can be offered location-specific information, registered with and mapped onto the surrounding urban fabric.

In essence, phone-based AR treats the handset like the transparent pane of a cockpit head-up display: you hold it before you, its camera captures the forward-facing view, and this is rendered on the screen transparently but for whatever overlay of information is applied. Turn and the on-screen view turns with you, tracked (after a momentary stutter) by the grid of overlaid graphics. And those graphics can provide anything the network can: identification, annotation, direction or commentary.

It’s not hard to see why developers and enthusiasts might jump at this potential, even given the sharp limits imposed by the phone as platform. We move through the world and we act in it, but the knowledge we base our movements and actions on is always starkly less than what it might be. And we pay the price for this daily, in increments of waste, frustration, exhaustion and missed opportunity. By contrast, the notion that everything the network knows might be brought to bear on someone or -thing standing before us, directly there, directly present, available to anyone with the wherewithal to sign a two-year smartphone contract and download an app — this is a deeply seductive idea. It offers the same aura of omnipotence, that same frisson of godlike power evoked by our new ability to gather, sift and make meaning of the traces of urban activity, here positioned as a direct extension of our own senses.

2

Why not take advantage of this capability? After all, the richness and complexity of city life confronts us with any number of occasions on which the human sensorium could do with a little help.

Let a few hundred neurons in the middle fusiform gyrus of the brain’s right hemisphere be damaged, or fail to develop properly in the first place, and the result is a disorder called prosopagnosia, more commonly known as faceblindness. As the name suggests, the condition deprives its victims of the ability to recognize faces and associate them with individuals; at the limit, someone suffering with a severe case may be entirely unable to remember what his or her loved ones look like. So central is the ability to recognize others to human socialization, though, that even far milder cases cause significant problems.

Sadly, this is something I can attest to from firsthand experience. Like an estimated 2.5%[1] of the population, I suffer from the condition, and even in the relatively attenuated form I’m saddled with, my broad inability to recognize people has caused more than a few experiences of excruciating awkwardness. At least once or twice a month I run into people on the street who clearly have some degree of familiarity with me, and find myself unable to come up with even a vague idea of who they might be; I’ll introduce myself to a woman at a party, only to have her remind me (rather waspishly, but who can blame her) that we’d worked together on a months-long project. Deprived of contextual cues — the time and location at which I usually meet someone, a distinctive hairstyle or mode of dress — I generally find myself no more able to recognize former colleagues or students than I can complete strangers. And as uncomfortable as this can be for me, I can only imagine how humiliating it is for the person on the other end of the encounter.

I long ago lost track of the number of times in my life at which I would have been grateful for some subtle intercessionary agent: something that might drop a glowing outline over the face of someone approaching me and remind me of his or her name[2], the occasion on which we met last, maybe even what we talked about on that occasion. It would spare both of us from mortification, and shield my counterpart from the inadvertent but real insult implied by my failure to recognize them. So the ambition of using AR in this role is lovely — precisely the kind of sensitive technical deployment I believe in, where technology is used to lower the barriers to socialization, and reduce or eliminate the awkwardnesses that might otherwise prevent us from better knowing one another.

But it’s hard to imagine any such thing being accomplished by the act of holding a phone up in front of my face, between us, forcing you to wait first for me to do so and then for the entire chain of technical events that must follow in order to fulfill the aim at the heart of the scenario. The device must acquire an image of your face with the camera, establish the parameters of that face from the image, and upload those parameters to the cloud via the fastest available connection, so they may be compared with a database of facial measurements belonging to known individuals; if a match is found, the corresponding profile must be located, and the appropriate information from that profile piped back down the connection so it may be displayed as an overlay on the screen image.

Too many articulated parts are involved in this interaction, too many dependencies — not least of which is the coöperation of a Facebook, a Google, or some other enterprise with a reasonably robust database of facial biometrics, and that is of course wildly problematic for other reasons. Better I should have confessed my confusion to you in the first place.

Perhaps a less technologically-intensive scenario would be better suited to the phone as platform for augmentation? How about helping a user find their way around the transit system, amidst all the involutions of the urban labyrinth?

3

Here we can weigh the merits of the use case by considering an actual, shipping product, Acrossair’s Nearest Subway app for the iPhone, first released in 2010[3]. Like its siblings for London and Paris, Nearest Tube and Nearest Metro, Nearest Subway uses open location data made available by the city’s transit authority to specify the positions of transit stops in three-dimensional space. On launch, the app loads a hovering scrim of simple black tiles featuring the name of each station, and icons of the lines that serve it; the tiles representing more distant stations are stacked atop those that are closer. Rotate, and the scrim of tiles rotates with you. Whichever way you face, you’ll see a tile representing the nearest subway station in the direction of view, so long as some outpost of the transit network lies along that bearing in the first place.

Nearest Subway is among the more aesthetically appealing phone-based AR applications, eschewing junk graphics for simple, text-based captions sensitively tuned to the conventions of each city’s transit system. If nothing else, it certainly does what it says on the tin. It is, however, almost completely worthless as a practical aid to urban navigation.

When aimed to align with the Manhattan street grid from the corner of 30th Street and First Avenue, Nearest Subway indicates that the 21st Street G stop in Long Island City is the closest subway station, at a distance of 1.4 miles in a north-northeasterly direction.

As it happens, there are a few problems with this. For starters, from this position the Vernon Boulevard-Jackson Avenue stop on the 7 line is 334 meters, or roughly four New York City blocks, closer than 21st Street, but it doesn’t appear as an option. This is either an exposure of some underlying lacuna in the transit authority’s database — unlikely, but as anyone familiar with the MTA understands implicitly, well within the bounds of possibility — or more probably a failure on Acrossair’s part to write code that retrieves these coordinates properly.


Just as problematically, the claimed bearing is roughly 55 degrees off. If, as will tend to be the case in Manhattan, you align yourself with the street grid, a phone aimed directly uptown will be oriented at 27 degrees east of due north, at which point Nearest Subway suggests that the 21st Street station is directly ahead of you. But it actually lies on an azimuth of 82 degrees; if you took the app at its word, you’d be walking uptown a long time before you hit anything even resembling a subway station. This is most likely to be a calibration error with the iPhone’s compass, but fairly or otherwise Nearest Subway shoulders the greater part of the blame here — as anyone familiar with computational systems has understood since the time of Babbage, if you put garbage in, you’ll get garbage out.

Furthermore, since by design the app only displays those stations roughly aligned with your field of vision, there’s no way for it to notify you that the nearest station may be directly behind your back. Unless you want to rotate a full 360 degrees, then, and make yourself look like a complete idiot in the process, the most practical way to use Nearest Subway is to aim the phone directly down, which makes a reasonably useful ring of directional arrows and distances pop up. (These, of course, could have been superimposed on a conventional map in the first place, without undertaking the effort of capturing the camera image and augmenting it with a hovering overlay of theoretically compass-calibrated information.)

However unfortunate these stumbles may be, they can all be resolved, addressed with tighter code, an improved user interface or a better bearing-determination algorithm. Acrossair could fix them all, though — enter every last issue in a bug tracker, and knock them down one by one — and that still wouldn’t address the primary idiocy of urban AR in this mode: from 30th Street and First Avenue, the 21st Street G stop is across the East River. You need to take a subway to get there in the first place. However aesthetically pleasing an interface may be, using it to find the closest station as the crow flies does you less than no good when you’re separated from it by a thousand meters of water.

Finally, Nearest Subway betrays a root-level misunderstanding of the relationship between a citydweller and a transportation network. In New York City, as in every other city with a complex underground transit system, you almost never find yourself in a situation where you need to find the station that’s nearest in absolute terms to begin with; it’s far more useful to find the nearest station on a line that gets you where you want to go. Even at the cost of cluttering what’s on the screen, then, the very first thing the would-be navigator of the subway system needs is a way to filter the options before them by line.

I raise these points not to park all of the blame at Acrossair’s door, but to suggest that AR itself is badly unsuited to this role, at least when handled in this particular way. It takes less time to load and use a map than it does to retrieve the same information from an augmentive application, and the map provides a great deal more of the context so necessary to orienting yourself in the city. At this point in technological evolution, then, more conventional interface styles will tend to furnish a user with relevant information more efficiently, with less of the latency, error and cruft that inevitably seem to attend the attempt to superimpose it over the field of vision.

4

If phone-based augmentation performs poorly as social lubricant or aid to urban navigation, what about another role frequently proposed for AR, especially by advocates in the cultural heritage sector? This use case hinges on the argument that by superimposing images or other vestiges of the past of a place directly over its present, AR effectively endows its users with the ability to see through time.

This might not make much sense at all in Songdo, or Masdar, or any of the other new cities now being built from scratch on greenfield sites. But anyone who lives in a place old enough to have felt the passage of centuries knows that history can all too easily be forgotten by the stones of the city. Whatever perturbations from historical events may still be propagating through the various flows of people, matter, energy and information that make a place, they certainly aren’t evident to casual inspection. An augmented view returning the layered past to the present, in such a way as to color our understanding of the things all around us, might certainly prove to be more emotionally resonant than any conventional monument.

Byzantium, old Edo, Roman Londinium, even New Amsterdam: each of these historical sites is rife with traces we might wish to surface in the city occupying the same land at present. Locales overwhelmed by more recent waves of colonization, gentrification or redevelopment, too, offer us potent lenses through which to consider our moment in time. It would surely be instructive to retrieve some record of the jazz- and espresso-driven Soho of the 1950s and layer it over what stands there at present; the same goes for the South Bronx of 1975. But traversed as it was during the twentieth century by multiple, high-intensity crosscurrents of history, Berlin may present the ultimate terrain on which to contemplate recuperation of the past.

This is a place where pain, guilt and a sense of responsibility contend with the simple desire to get on with things; no city I’m familiar with is more obsessively dedicated to the search for a tenable balance between memory and forgetting. The very core of contemporary Berlin is given over to a series of puissant absences and artificially-sustained presences, from the ruins of Gestapo headquarters, now maintained as a museum called Topography of Terror, to the remnants of Checkpoint Charlie. A long walk to the east out leafy Karl-Marx-Allee — Stalinallee, between 1949 and 1961 — takes you to the headquarters of the Stasi, the feared secret police of the former East Germany, also open to the public as a museum. But there’s nowhere in Berlin where the curious cost of remembering can be more keenly felt than in the field of 2,711 concrete slabs at the corner of Ebertstrasse and Hannah-Arendt-Strasse. This is the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, devised by architect Peter Eisenman, with early conceptual help from the sculptor Richard Serra.

Formally, the grim array is the best thing Eisenman has ever set his hand to, very nearly redemptive of a career dedicated to the elevation of fatuous theory over aesthetic coherence; perhaps it’s the Serra influence. But as a site of memory, the Monument leaves a great deal to be desired. It’s what Michel Foucault called a heterotopia: something set apart from the ordinary operations of the city, physically and semantically, a place of such ponderous gravity that visitors don’t quite know what to make of it. On my most recent visit, the canyons between the slabs rang with the laughter of French schoolchildren on a field trip; the children giggled and flirted and shouted to one another as they leapt between the stones, and whatever the designer’s intent may have been, any mood of elegy or commemoration was impossible to establish, let alone maintain.

Roughly two miles to the northeast, on the sidewalk in front of a doner stand in Mitte, is a memorial of quite a different sort. Glance down, and you’ll see the following words, inscribed into three brass cubes set side by side by side between the cobblestones:

HIER WOHNTE
ELSA GUTTENTAG
GEB. KRAMER
JG. 1883

DEPORTIERT 29.11.1942
ERMORDET IN
AUSCHWITZ

HIER WOHNTE
KURT GUTTENTAG
JG. 1877

DEPORTIERT 29.11.1942
ERMORDET IN
AUSCHWITZ

HIER WOHNTE
ERWIN BUCHWALD
JG. 1892

DEPORTIERT 1.3.1943
ERMORDET IN
AUSCHWITZ

Ermordet in Auschwitz: that is, on specific dates in November of 1942 and March of the next year, the named people living at this address were taken across this very sidewalk and forcibly transported hundreds of miles east by the machinery of their own government, to a country they’d never known and a facility expressly designed to murder them. The looming façades around you were the last thing they ever saw as free people.

It’s in the dissonance between the everyday bustle of Mitte and these implacable facts that the true horror resides — and that’s precisely what makes the brass cubes a true memorial, indescribably more effective than Eisenman’s. The brass cubes, it turns out, are Stolpersteine, or “stumbling blocks,” a project of artist Gunter Demnig; these are but three of what are now over 32,000 that Demnig has arranged to have placed in some 700 cities. The Stolpersteine force us to read this stretch of unremarkable sidewalk in two ways simultaneously: both as a place where ordinary people go placidly about their ordinary business, just as they did in 1942, and as one site of a world-historical, continental-scale ravening.

The stories etched in these stones are the kind of facts about a place that would seem to yield to a strategy of augmentation. The objection could certainly be raised that I found them so resonant precisely because I didn’t see them every day, and that their impact would very likely fade with constant exposure; we might call this the evil of banality. But being compelled to see and interpret the mundane things I did in these streets through the revenant past altered my consciousness, in ways subtler and longer-lasting than anything Eisenman’s sepulchral array of slabs was able to achieve. AR would merely make the metaphor literal — in fact, it’s easy for me to imagine the disorienting, decentering, dis-placing impact of having to engage the world through a soft rain of names, overlaid onto the very places from which their owners were stolen.

But once again, it’s hard to imagine this happening via the intercession of a handset. Nor are the qualities that make smartphone-based AR so catastrophically clumsy, in virtually every scenario of use, particularly likely to change over time.

The first is the nature of functionality on the smartphone. As we’ve seen, the smartphone is a platform on which each discrete mode of operation is engaged via a dedicated, single-purpose app. Any attempt at augmenting the environment, therefore, must be actively and consciously invoked, to the exclusion of other useful functionality. The phone, when used to provide such an overlay, cannot also and at the same time be used to send a message, look up an address, buy a cup of coffee, or do any of the other things we now routinely expect of it.

The second reservation is physical. Providing the user with a display surface for graphic annotation of the forward view simply isn’t what the handset was designed to do. It must be held before the eyes like a pane of glass in order for the augmented overlay to work as intended. It hardly needs to be pointed out that this gesture is not one particularly well-suited to the realities of urban experience. It has the doubly unappealing quality of announcing the user’s distraction and vulnerability to onlookers, while simultaneously ensuring that the device is held in the weak grip of the extended arm — a grasp from which it may be plucked with relative ease.

Taken together, these two impositions strongly undercut the primary ostensible virtue of an augmented view, which is its immediacy. The sole genuine justification for AR is the idea that information is simply there, copresent with that you’re already looking at and able to be assimilated without thought or effort.

That sense of effortlessness is precisely what an emerging class of wearable mediators aims to provide for its users. The first artifact of this class to reach consumers is Google’s Glass, which mounts a high-definition, forward-facing camera, a head-up reticle and the microphone required by the natural-language speech recognition interface on a lightweight aluminum frame. While Glass poses any number of aesthetic, practical and social concerns — all of which remain to be convincingly addressed, by Google or anyone else — it does at least give us a way to compare hands-free, head-mounted AR with the handset-based approach.

Would any of the three augmentation scenarios we explored be improved by moving the informational overlay from the phone to a wearable display?

5

A system designed to mitigate my prosopagnosia by recognizing faces for me would assuredly be vastly better when accessed via head-mounted interface; in fact, that’s the only scenario of technical intervention in relatively close-range interpersonal encounters that’s credible to me. The delay and physical awkwardness occasioned by having to hold a phone between us goes away, and while there would still be a noticeable saccade or visual stutter as I glanced up to read your details off my display, this might well be preferable to not being remembered at all.

That is, if we can tolerate the very significant threats to privacy involved, which only start with Google’s ownership of or access to the necessary biometric database. There’s also the question of their access to the pattern of my requests, and above all the one fact inescapably inherent to the scenario: that people are being identified as being present in a certain time and place, without any necessity whatsoever of securing consent on their part. By any standard, this is a great deal of risk to take on, all to lubricate social interactions for 2.5% of the population.

Nearest Subway, as is, wouldn’t be improved by presentation in the line of sight. Given what we’ve observed about the way people really use subway networks, information about the nearest station in a given direction wouldn’t be of any greater utility when splashed on a head-up display than it is on the screen of a phone. Whatever the shortcomings of this particular app, though, they probably don’t imply anything in particular about the overall viability of wearable AR in the role of urban navigation, and in many ways the technology does seem rather well-suited to the wayfinding challenges faced by the pedestrian.

Of the three scenarios considered here, though, it’s AR’s potential to offer novel perspectives on the past of a place that would be most likely to benefit from the wearable approach. We would quite literally see the quotidian environment through the lens of a history superimposed onto it. So equipped, we could more easily plumb the psychogeographical currents moving through a given locale, better understand how the uses of a place had changed over time, or hadn’t. And because this layer of information could be selectively surfaced — invoked and banished via voice command, toggled on or off at will — presenting information in this way might well circumvent the potential for banality through overfamiliarization that haunts even otherwise exemplary efforts like Demnig’s Stolpersteine.

And this suggests something about further potentially productive uses for augmentive mediators like Glass. After all, there are many kinds of information that may be germane to our interpretation of a place, yet effectively invisible to us, and historical context is just one of them. If our choices are shaped by dark currents of traffic and pricing, crime and conviviality, it’s easy to understand the appeal of any technology proposing that these dimensions of knowledge be brought to bear on that which is seen, whether singly or in combination. The risk of bodily harm, whatever its source, might be rendered as a red wash over the field of vision; point-by-point directions as a bright and unmistakable guideline reaching into the landscape. In fact any pattern of use and activity, so long as its traces were harvested by some data-gathering system and made available to the network, might be made manifest to us in this way.

Some proposed uses of mediation are more ambitious still, pushing past mere annotation of the forward view to the provision of truly novel modes of perception — for example, the ability to “see” radiation at wavelengths beyond the limits of human vision, or even to delete features of the visual environment perceived as undesirable[4]. What, then, keeps wearable augmentation from being the ultimate way for networked citizens to receive and act on information?

6

The approach of practical, consumer-grade augmented reality confronts us with a interlocking series of concerns, ranging from the immediately practical to the existential.

A first set of reservations centers on the technical difficulties involved in the articulation of an acceptably high-quality augmentive experience. We’ve so far bypassed discussion of these so we could consider different aspects of the case for AR, but ultimately they’re not of a type that allows anyone to simply wave them away.

At its very core, the AR value proposition subsists in the idea that interactions with information presented in this way are supposed to feel “effortless,” but any such effortlessness would require the continuous (and continuously smooth) interfunctioning of a wild scatter of heterogeneous elements. In order to make good on this promise, a mediation apparatus would need to fuse all of the following elements: a sensitively-designed interface; the population of that interface with accurate, timely, meaningful and actionable information; and a robust, high-bandwidth connection to the networked assets furnishing that information from any point in the city, indoors or out. Even putting questions of interface design to the side, the technical infrastructure capable of delivering the other necessary elements reliably enough that the attempt at augmentation doesn’t constitute a practical and social hazard in its own right does not yet exist — not anywhere in North America, anyway, and not this year or next. The hard fact is that for a variety of reasons having to do with national spectrum policy, a lack of perceived business incentives for universal broadband connectivity, and other seemingly intractable circumstances, these issues are nowhere near being ironed out.

In the context of augmentation, as well, the truth value of representations made about the world acquires heightened significance. By superimposing information directly on its object, AR arrogates to itself a peculiar kind of claim to authority, a claim of a more aggressive sort than that implicit in other modes of representation, and therefore ought to be held to a higher standard of completeness and accuracy[5]. As we saw with Nearest Subway, though, an overlay can only ever be as good as the data feeding it, and the augurs in this respect are not particularly reassuring. Right now, Google’s map of the commercial stretch nearest to my apartment building provides labels for only four of the seven storefront businesses on the block, one of which is inaccurately identified as a restaurant that closed many years ago. If even Google, with all the resources it has at its disposal, struggles to provide its users with a description of the streetscape that is both comprehensive and correct, how much more daunting will other actors find the same task?

Beyond this are the documented problems with visual misregistration[6] and latency that are of over a decade’s standing, and have not been successfully addressed in that time — if anything, have only been exacerbated by the shift to consumer-grade hardware. At issue is the mediation device’s ability to track rapid motions of the head, and smoothly and accurately realign any graphic overlay mapped to the world; any delay in realignment of more than a few tens of milliseconds is conspicuous, and risks causing vertigo, nausea and problems with balance and coordination. The initial release of Glass, at least, wisely shies away from any attempt to superimpose such overlays, but the issue must be reckoned with at some point if useful augmentive navigational applications are ever to be developed.

7

Another set of concerns centers on the question of how long such a mediator might comfortably be worn, and what happens after it is taken off. This is of especial concern given the prospect that one or another form of wearable AR might become as prominent in the negotiation of everyday life as the smartphone itself. There is, of course, not much in the way of meaningful prognostication that can be made ahead of any mass adoption, but it’s not unreasonable to build our expectations on the few things we do know empirically.

Early users of Google’s Glass report disorientation upon removing the headset, after as few as fifteen minutes of use — a mild one, to be sure, and easily shaken off, from all accounts the sort of uneasy feeling that attends staring overlong at an optical illusion. If this represents the outer limit of discomfort experienced by users, it’s hard for me to believe that it would have much impact on either the desirability of the product or people’s ability to function after using it. But further hints as to the consequences of long-term use can be gleaned from the testimony of pioneering researcher Steve Mann, who has worn a succession of ever-lighter and more-capable mediation rigs all but continuously since the mid-1980s. And his experience would seem to warrant a certain degree of caution: Mann, in his own words, early on “developed a dependence on the apparatus,” and has found it difficult to function normally on the few occasions he has been forcibly prevented from accessing his array of devices.

When deprived of his set-up for even a short period of time, Mann experiences “profound nausea, dizziness and disorientation”; he can neither see clearly nor concentrate, and has difficulty with basic cognitive and motor tasks[7]. He speculates that over many years, his neural wiring has adapted to the continuous flow of sensory information through his equipment, and this is not an entirely ridiculous thing to think. At this point, the network of processes that constitutes Steve Mann’s brain — that in some real albeit reductive sense constitutes Steve Mann — lives partially outside his skull.

The objection could be made that this is always already the case, for all of us — that some nontrivial part of everything that make us what we are lives outside of us, in the world, and that Mann’s situation is only different in that much of his outboard being subsists in a single, self-designed apparatus. But if anything, this makes the prospect of becoming physiologically habituated to something like Google Glass still more worrisome. It’s precisely because Mann developed and continues to manage his own mediation equipment that he can balance his dependency on it with the relative freedom of action enjoyed by someone who for the most part is able to determine the parameters under which that equipment operates.

If Steve Mann has become a radically hybridized consciousness, at least he has a legitimate claim to ownership and control over all of the places where that consciousness is instantiated. By contrast, all of the things a commercial product like Glass can do for the user rely on the ongoing provision of a service — and if there’s anything we know about services, it’s that they can be and are routinely discontinued at will, as the provider fails, changes hands, adopts a new business strategy or simply reprioritizes.

8

A final set of strictly practical concerns have to do with the collective experience of augmentation, or what implications our own choice to be mediated in this way might hold for the experience of others sharing the environment.

For all it may pretend to transparency, literally and metaphorically, any augmentive mediator by definition imposes itself between the wearer and the phenomenal world. This, of course, is by no means a quality unique to augmented reality. It’s something AR has in common with a great many ways we already buffer and mediate what we experience as we move through urban space, from listening to music to wearing sunglasses. All of these impose a certain distance between us and the full experiential manifold of the street, either by baffling the traces of it that reach our senses, or by offering us a space in which we can imagine and project an alternative narrative of our actions.

But there’s a special asymmetry that haunts our interactions with networked technology, and tends to undermine our psychic investment in the immediate physical landscape; if “cyberspace is where you are when you’re on the phone,” it’s certainly also the “place” you are when you text or tweet someone while walking down the sidewalk. I’ve generally referred to what happens when someone moves through the city while simultaneously engaged in some kind of remote interaction as a condition of “multiple adjacency,” but of course it’s really no such thing: so far, at least, only one mode of spatial experience can be privileged at a given time. And if it’s impossible to participate fully in both of these realms at once, one of them must lose out.

Watch what happens when a pedestrian first becomes conscious of receiving a call or a text message, the immediate damming they cause in the sidewalk flow as they pause to respond to it. Whether the call is made hands-free or otherwise doesn’t really seem to matter; the cognitive and emotional investment in what transpires in the interface is what counts, and this investment is generally so much greater than it is in the surroundings that street life clearly suffers as a result. The risk inherent in this divided attention appears to be showing up in the relevant statistics in the form of an otherwise hard-to-account-for upturn in accidents involving pedestrian fatalities[8], where such numbers had been falling for years. This is a tendency that is only likely to be exacerbated by augmentive mediation, particularly where content of high inherent emotional involvement is concerned.

9

At this moment in time, it would be hard to exaggerate the appeal the prospect of wearable augmentation holds for its vocal cohort of enthusiasts within the technology community. This fervor can be difficult to comprehend, so long as AR is simply understood to refer to a class of technologies aimed at overlaying the visual field with information about the objects and circumstances in it.

What the discourse around AR shares with other contemporary trans- and posthuman narratives is a frustration with the limits of the flesh, and a frank interest in transcending them through technical means. To advocates, the true appeal of projects like Google’s Glass is that they are first steps toward the fulfillment of a deeper promise: that of becoming-cyborg. Some suggest that ordinary people mediate the challenges of everyday life via complex informational dashboards, much like those first devised by players of World of Warcraft and similar massively multiplayer online role-playing games. The more fervent dream of a day when their capabilities are enhanced far beyond the merely human by a seamless union of organic consciousness with networked sensing, processing, analytic and storage assets.

Beyond the profound technical and practical challenges involved in achieving any such goal, though, someone not committed to one or another posthuman program may find that they have philosophical reservations with this notion, and what it implies for urban life. These may be harder to quantify than strictly practical objections, but any advocate of augmentation technologies who is also interested in upholding the notion of a city as a shared space will have to come to some reckoning with them.

Anyone who cares about what we might call the full bandwidth of human communication — very much including transmission and reception of those cues vital to understanding, but only present beneath the threshold of conscious perception — ought to be concerned about the risk posed to interpersonal exchanges by augmentive mediation. Wearable devices clearly have the potential to exacerbate existing problems of self-absorption and mutual inconsideration[9]. Although in principle there’s no reason such devices couldn’t be designed to support or even enrich the sense of intersubjectivity, what we’ve seen about the technologically-mediated pedestrian’s unavailability to the street doesn’t leave us much room for optimism on this count. The implication is that if the physical environment doesn’t fully register to a person so equipped, neither will other people.

Nor is the body by any means the only domain that the would-be posthuman subject may wish to transcend via augmentation. Subject as it is to the corrosive effects of entropy and time, forcing those occupying it to contend with the inconvenient demands of others, the built environment is another. Especially given current levels of investment in physical infrastructure in the United States, there is a very real risk that those who are able to do so will prefer retreat behind a wall of mediation to the difficult work of being fully present in public. At its zenith, this tendency implies both a dereliction of public space and an almost total abandonment of any notion of a shared public realm. This is the scenario imagined by science-fiction author Vernor Vinge in Rainbows End (2006), in which people interact with the world’s common furniture through branded thematic overlays of their choice; it’s a world that can be glimpsed in the matter-of-factly dystopian videos of Keiichi Matsuda, in which a succession of squalid environments come to life only when activated by colorful augmentive animations.

The most distressing consequences of such a dereliction would be felt by those left behind in any rush toward augmentation. What happens when the information necessary to comprehend and operate an environment is not immanent to that environment, but has become decoupled from it? When signs, directions, notifications, alerts and all the other instructions necessary to the fullest use of the city appear only in an augmentive overlay, and as is inevitably the case, that overlay is available to some but not others[10]? What happens to the unaugmented human under such circumstances? The perils would surely extend beyond a mere inability to act on information; the non-adopter of a particularly hegemonic technology almost always places themselves at jeopardy of being seen as a willful transgressor of norms, even an ethical offender. Anyone forgoing augmentation, for whatever reason, may find that they are perceived as somehow less than a full member of the community, with everything that implies for the right to be and act in public.

The deepest critique of all those lodged against augmented reality is sociologist Anne Galloway’s, and it is harder to answer. Galloway suggests that the discourse of computational augmentation, whether consciously or otherwise, “position[s] everyday places and social interactions as somewhat lacking or in need of improvement.” Again there’s this Greshamization, this sense of a zero-sum relationship between AR and a public realm already in considerable peril just about everywhere. Maybe the emergence of these systems will spur us to some thought as to what it is we’re trying so hard to augment. Philip K. Dick once defined reality as “that which refuses to go away when you stop believing in it,” and it’s this bedrock quality of universal accessibility — to anyone at all, at any time of his or her choosing — that constitutes its primary virtue. If nothing else, reality is the one platform we all share, a ground we can start from in undertaking the arduous and never-comfortable process of determining what else we might agree upon. To replace this shared space with the million splintered and mutually inconsistent realities of individual augmentation is to give up on the whole pretense that we in any way occupy the same world, and therefore strikes me as being deeply inimical to the urban project as I understand it. A city in which the physical environment has ceased to function as a common reference frame is, at the very least, terribly inhospitable soil for democracy, solidarity or simple fellow-feeling to take root in.

It may well be that this concern is overblown. There is always the possibility that augmented reality never will amount to very much, or that after a brief period of consideration it’s actively rejected by the mainstream audience. Within days of the first significant nonspecialist publicity around Google Glass, Seattle dive bar The 5 Point became the first commercial establishment known to have enacted a ban[11] on the device, and if we can fairly judge from the rather pungent selection of terms used to describe Glass wearers in the early media commentary, it won’t be the last. By the time you read these words, these weak signals may well have solidified into some kind of rough consensus, at least in North America, that wearing anything like Glass in public space constitutes a serious faux pas. Perhaps this and similar AR systems will come to rest in a cultural-aesthetic purgatory like that currently occupied by Bluetooth headsets, and if that does turn out to be the case, any premature worry about the technology’s implications for the practice of urban democracy will seem very silly indeed.

But something tells me that none of the objections we’ve discussed here will prove broadly dissuasive, least of all my own personal feelings on the subject. For all the hesitations anybody may have, and for all the vulnerabilities even casual observers can readily diagnose in the chain of technical articulations that produces an augmentive overlay, it is hard to argue against a technology that glimmers with the promise of transcendence. Over anything beyond the immediate near term, some form of wearable augmentive device does seem bound to take a prominent role in returning networked information to the purview of a mobile user at will, and thereby in mediating the urban experience. The question then becomes what kind(s) of urbanity will be produced by people endowed with this particular set of capabilities, individually and collectively, and how we might help the unmediated contend with cities unlike any they have known, enacted for the convenience of the ambiguously transhuman, under circumstances whose depths have yet to be plumbed.


Notes on this section
[1] Grüter T, Grüter M, Carbon CC (2008). “Neural and genetic foundations of face recognition and prosopagnosia”. J Neuropsychol 2 (1): 79–97.

[2] For early work toward this end, see http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~thad/p/journal/augmented-reality-through-wearable-computing.pdf. The overlay of a blinking outline or contour used as an identification cue, incidentally, has long been a staple of science-fictional information displays, showing up in pop culture as far back as the late 1960s. The earliest appearance I can locate is 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), in which the navigational displays of both the Orion III spaceplane and Discovery itself relied heavily on the trope — this, presumably, because they were produced by the same contractor, IBM. See also Pete Shelley’s music video for “Homosapien” (1981) and the traverse corridors projected through the sky of Blade Runner’s Los Angeles (1982).

[3] As always, I caution the reader that the specifics of products and services, their availability will certainly change over time. All comments here regarding Nearest Subway pertain to v1.4.

[4] See discussion of “Superplonk” in [a later section]. http://m.spectrum.ieee.org/podcast/geek-life/profiles/steve-manns-better-version-of-reality

[5] At the very least, user interface should offer some kind of indication as to the confidence of a proffered identification, and perhaps how that determination was arrived at. See [a later section] on seamfulness.

[6] Azuma, “Registration Errors in Augmented Reality,” 1997.

http://www.cs.unc.edu/~azuma/azuma_AR.html

[7] http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/14/technology/at-airport-gate-a-cyborg-unplugged.html

[8] See Governors Highway Safety Association, “Spotlight on Highway Safety: Pedestrian Fatalities by State,” 2010. http://www.ghsa.org/html/publications/pdf/spotlights/spotlight_ped.pdf; similarly, a recent University of Utah study found that the act of immersion in a conversation, rather than any physical aspect of use, is the primary distraction while driving and talking on the phone. That hands-free headset may not keep you out of a crash after all. http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=205207840

[9] A story on the New York City-based gossip site Gawker expressed this point of view directly, if rather pungently: “If You Wear Google’s New Glasses, You Are An Asshole.” http://gawker.com/5990395/if-you-wear-googles-new-glasses-you-are-an-asshole

[10] The differentiation involved might be very fine-grained indeed. Users may interact with informational objects that exist only for them and for that single moment.

[11] The first widespread publicity for Glass coincided with Google’s release of a video on Wednesday, 20th February, 2013; The 5 Point announced its ban on 5th March. The expressed concerns center more on the device’s data-collection capability than anything else: according to owner Dave Meinert, his customers “don’t want to be secretly filmed or videotaped and immediately put on the Internet,” and this is an entirely reasonable expectation, not merely in the liminal space of a dive bar but anywhere in the city. See http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57573387-93/seattle-dive-bar-becomes-first-to-ban-google-glass/

Daybreak on a Wednesday in April, sometime in the first third of the twenty-first century. The lights come up slowly in Maria Villanueva’s condo, forty-seven stories up the side of the soaring Phase III development. It’s a few weeks past the first anniversary of Maria’s arrival in Noblessity, and in some ways she’s still getting used to the way she lives in this brand-new city of ten square kilometers, so recently and famously reclaimed from the ocean itself.

Her building, for example: a daringly helical twist of stacked apartment units, devised by a name-brand Danish architectural practice. Back home she could never have afforded to live in anything remotely like this — and that’s if there even were buildings like this at home in the first place, which she doubts. This morning the active shutters, sensing a rare onshore breeze, have deployed microfilaments to trap the moisture in the air, softly hazing them at the edges so they seem to blur into the murky sunlight. Even the soft light that makes it through is too bright for Maria, though, and she clutches vaguely at bedside for her phone so she can launch the app that controls the windowshades.

Maria’s husband Mark left for work hours ago — he’s a lawyer negotiating EMEA rebroadcast rights for an American basketball league, and his teleconferences tend to happen on Los Angeles time. So on this Wednesday morning, she finds she has the apartment to herself. She drags herself from bed, shouts for the kitchen to fix her a latte and heads to the en-suite bathroom.

Headlines stack up on the mirror, and Maria scans them as she blowdries her hair: “Climate talks enter a third fruitless…guest-worker privileges revoked following…Royal scandal erupts as Mail drone captures…” None of this seems like it will immediately bear on her work, and just as quickly as the headlines arrive she dismisses them, with the mere swipe of a fingertip.

The walk-in closet has an app to choose outfits appropriate to the weather, but the weather’s always the same here — punishingly hot and dry outside, and invariably a comfortable 72º everywhere that isn’t. Maria has never once launched the app. She gives herself a last quick once-over in the full-length, pats down a few vagrant strands of hair, and then it’s off to work.

Maria belongs to an elite team of analysts tasked with riding herd on autonomous trading algorithms for a City of London-based financial concern. After a solid six months in which she made a newcomers’s show of diligence, she’d rather gotten used to the luxury of working from home most days of the week, but in the interests of team cohesion senior management has just issued a policy forbidding this. And so once again she finds herself faced with the necessity of a twice-daily commute between the ranked condos of the residential zone and the supertowers of the Central Business District.

This is not, as it happens, a huge imposition. The mobility fee is included in her compensation package, and actually, the drive isn’t so bad; depending on traffic and the precise route chosen by the car, it takes anywhere from ten to fifteen minutes. Maria knows from experience that if she calls the car service as she walks out the front door of her unit, her car will be pulling up under the porte-cochère just as she gets there. And so it is this morning, the elevator, as always, alert to the patterns of movement within the building and therefore empty of anyone else. She momentarily realizes she’s forgotten, again, to shut off the lights in the closet, but it doesn’t matter; but for the low-level autonomic systems, everything in the condo fades to black thirty seconds after the unit detects a lack of human presence.

The briefest blast of desiccating heat, and then she’s safely into the car. Today’s car is a little funky, a little foul — not so much that somebody had actually smoked a cigar in it, but maybe that it had recently been used by somebody who smoked a lot of cigars. And used rather too much cologne. Maria punches the air conditioning to its highest setting and tries to breathe through her mouth.

There’s apparently been a fender-bender on the Grand Axial, and the car is rerouted around it without so much as a peep. And so Maria finds that her way to work this morning takes her via the Coastal Ringway, past the three enormous pipelines that supply Noblessity with fresh water from the mainland. This is provided by the host nation at no expense, for the duration of the developer’s 99-year lease on the land — just one of the many ways the host nation expresses its gratitude for the massive infusion of talent and capital sitting just offshore. Of course it’s been awhile since Maria crossed the causeway; truth be told, she only does so on her way to or from the airport. But she keeps meaning to drag Mark over for a visit, get a taste for how the people here really live, and one of these weekends she’s sure they will.

Just past the ten-story screen that fronts the Museum of Contemporary Art, as the car passes beneath the overway heralding entry into the CBD, the windshield starts to pulse red. The soft bonging of an awareness alert issues from the dashboard, and there is the slightest sideways lurch as the car moves to put some distance between itself and a disturbance rapidly approaching in the curbside lane. On the sidewalk ahead, a man in the yellow coveralls of a guest worker is visibly struggling with two Public Safety men. The windshield overlay has identified him as a PDP, or Potentially Disruptive Person. Ever since the bombings in Rio, of course, everyone’s been a little bit on edge, and feeling the slightest bit guilty that she’d ignored the headline earlier in the morning, Maria taps a finger on the windshield for more information. The public scanners have registered an unidentifiable, roughly weapon-sized object under the man’s clothing; and this, correlated with his location and immigration status, is surely enough to trip the threat-detection algorithm’s probability threshold.

But they’re barely abreast of the disturbance before a Public Safety van has whisked up to the curb, and amid a sudden bloom of khaki PS uniforms the guest worker is hustled in and away. Maria’s car torques up with the silent immediacy of electric drive; with a quick and almost subliminal sigh, she releases the tension she barely knew she was carrying, and the unpleasantness rapidly dwindles in the rearview mirror.

Before long the car glides to a halt in front of the Bourse, and the door pops open to let Maria exit before heading off to its next booking. Maria places great stock in mindfulness, so today as every day she takes a moment to pause for a moment, breathe, and contemplate the massive visualization that pulses across the entire width and breadth of the façade. It’s hard to make out in direct sunlight, but if you shield your eyes and look carefully you can see how the whole surface of the building shimmers with graphics representing real-time trading activity.

At this hour, it’s still last night in Chicago and New York, and half a day yet before the London and Frankfurt exchanges open. So the activity dancing across the façade is all the Nikkei, the Hang Seng and the CSI 300…and the blips of an algorithm she and her colleagues have dubbed Dirty Frank, leaving its bizarre and so-far unfathomed spoor of stochastic trades across the minutes.

The view on Maria’s desk, of course, is more sophisticated by far than the poppy visualization splashed across the façade. Her job is to reverse-engineer algorithms like Dirty Frank, determine the logic driving each one, and help her firm develop tactics to counter them. The few hours of morning work pass quickly, as work always will for someone who is paid well to do what she’s good at, and loves what she is paid to do, and lunchtime rolls around before she knows it.

Everyone knows how awkward it can be to socialize with folks working in different backgrounds, so Maria’s agenda app has booked her for lunch in a restaurant rated highly over the past six weeks by people whose activity on Noblessity’s resident-only social network suggests a high degree of compatibility. But when she gets out onto the Plaza, she finds it unusually, even alarmingly crowded, and asks one of her building’s uniformed concierges if he knows what’s going on.

It seems a private shopper for one of the luxury boutiques on the Skydeck level, deputized to serve one of the members of the boy band that played the Performing Arts Center last night, has uploaded a brief video of her charge shimmying into a tight new pullover — and of course the time- and location-stamped video has gone viral locally. In the fullness of time the shopper will be fired, doubtlessly, but the damage is already done. A lengthening line of cars waits to disgorge passengers at each of the bays around the plaza’s perimeter, and the walks and overways are perceptibly starting to fill with giddy young women.

The mast-mounted cameras high above Bourse Plaza have, of course, identified the potentially troublesome concentration of pedestrians, just as roadbed sensors register the increased traffic load and flag it for immediate attention. It’s just after shift change in Noblessity’s Intelligent Operations Center deep beneath the streets, and the fresh crew is quick to respond to the emergent condition – except for special occasions like the annual Jazz Festival, management likes to keep densities in the CBD low, and the oversight team’s contractual performance incentives depend on keeping the sidewalks at Level of Service C or better.

Ordinarily, of course, this isn’t an issue; between the oppressive heat and the long, triumphal blocks, nobody tends to walk very much or very far in Noblessity. Thanks to the private shopper’s indiscretion, though, today is shaping up to be different. Traffic on the sidewalks has started to thicken, contraflow movement is beginning to be difficult, one or two leading indicators of social distress have started to show up on the Big Board. It’s little more than threshold activity at this point, but if nobody issues a command override, active countermeasures will be deployed…and mindful of those incentives, nobody does. Up go the bollards around the plaza, down go the gates on the overways, and one after another, all of the signals turn green on all of the routes leaving the area.

Maria finds herself rerouted for the second time this day, this time on foot. Her phone runs a few quick calculations against her standing parameters and winds up recommending a trattoria-style Italian place she’s never thought to try before, just the other side of the World Expo Center — happy serendipity. Of everything on the menu, there are only a few options lit up on the tabletop as falling within her current diet guidelines, but the Caesar salad she chooses is delicious. The ten-minute walk back to work mostly takes her through temperature-controlled spaces, while between them the gorgeous, ethnic-inspired patterns of the active brise-soleils have unfolded to shield the walkways from the worst of the noonday sun. Even the more visible crowd-dispersion measures have faded back.

By the time Maria calls it a day, the East Asian markets are long closed, but NASDAQ’s just getting started. With a brief series of taps, she formally passes operational responsibility to her New York-based colleagues, and puts her desk to sleep. Her drive home is daydreamy, if a bit subdued — the billboards along the route all seem to be down, and she watches them drift by in a succession of vivid frames the color of clear sky.

After she’s changed into workout clothes, Maria orders a car to the Recreation Zone. Despite the heat, she loves to run along the manicured paths set between the lakes and fountains, to measure her progress against the countersunk lighting pavers. At the entrance to Oceanside Park, a two-man construction crew with a miniature backhoe is digging up the sensors they emplaced just last year — management has sourced a newer model, cheaper and more capable. True to every word of the promises the headhunter made, Noblessity is continuously in the process of being upgraded.

As Maria huffs around the outer loop, her sunglasses keep a running tally of the calories she’s burning, representing them as a blue line climbing diagonally across her peripheral vision. As the blue of her efforts finally begins to track the green of the optimal curve set by her company’s employee wellness plan, she feels a tight glow of satisfaction well up inside her. A brief flourish of trumpets in her earbuds and an animated burst of fireworks means she’s unlocked a mileage target achievement. This will mean new options at dinner for sure.

The original plan for the evening was to meet Mark for dinner at the new robata grill on the garden level of Entertainment Sector South. But just as she turns into her final lap, Maria’s sunglasses light up with a call. It’s Mark; it turns out that he’s exhausted from what has been a long and arduous day of strategy sessions, and feeling pretty burnt out herself, they decide to meet up at home and order in. She knows from experience that she won’t even need to call for a car — the service’s adaptive load-balancing algorithm knows the fall of darkness will always mean a line of people who need rides home from the park — and the condo is mere minutes away.

Of the many amenities provided by her building, among Maria’s very favorites is the one she now avails herself of: ordered meals, like care packages from home and other deliveries, are deposited in the autolocker, so she doesn’t even need to deal with the delivery boy. Mark orders with a few taps on the kitchen screen, and they catch each other up on their respective days during the twenty or so minutes that go by before the autolocker chimes to announce the arrival of their dinner. They grab a few napkins and their containers of food and settle back on the couch to buy a movie from the wallscreen.

Before it’s even a third over, though, Maria realizes with a start that she’s started to nod off. She plants a kiss on the top of her husband’s head and pads off to bed. Just as she slides between the sheets, the briefest prayer of acknowledgment escapes her lips, a prayer of gratitude for another day of health, profit and productivity, another day in balance, another day in Noblessity.

Agnes immediately struck me as one of those force-of-nature types, and her studio was everything you’d expect and hope, a cabinet of curiosities furnished entirely with the everted contents of her own mind. The things I saw that day, little shardy glimpses of SoHo and the daily lifestyle of a SoHo artist circa 1983, remain indelible in my mind.

There was one piece of hers in particular I’ll never forget, at least in its general outlines. It was an open glass bowl, containing what to all appearances was a mound of incinerated human remains, bone chunks and all. And the placard mounted alongside the bowl read something like this:

These are the earthly remains of Firstname Lastname, who lived 71 years, 10 months, 13 days, 3 hours, 26 minutes and 17 seconds. In his lifetime he experienced 2,521,490,585 heartbeats and breathed 605,491,268 times. He urinated 39,280 times, for a total output volume of 48,872 liters, and experienced 24,718 bowel movements. In the course of his life he married twice, and enjoyed 3,668 sex acts with these two wives and 16 other partners (fourteen women and two men); including 12,463 acts of masturbation, mostly to completion, these resulted in a total of 15,531 orgasms.

I’m pretty sure about most of that stuff being there. (I’m absolutely certain of the word “orgasm,” because I’d never seen it outside of a verrrry furtively thumbed book before, and there it was on the wall in screaming 48-point Helvetica.)

What I’m less sure about is whether or not I’ve embroidered into the memory a final statistic, which was a figure representing the weight of the ashes. Anyway, that’s what I think of every time I hear someone talk about “the quantified self.”

Bear with me for a moment here.

I include markets, amazingly supple and efficient tools for bringing latent information to light, and bundling that information in the form of a signal we call “price.” But that is all they can do, for if information cannot somehow be reflected in price it does not exist to the market, no matter how vitally salient it may be to our choices and life outcomes.

Government, the state, operates best at scale, and functions best when protecting us — not by any means exclusively the most vulnerable among us – from the doleful implications of a world purely organized along market lines. It is best at serving ends none of us could achieve when organized exclusively from the bottom up, no matter how dedicated, and at capturing collective benefit from circumstances the market does not recognize. But I am wary of its coercive power, and believe that these measures are close to all we should let it do for us.

Mutual aid and only mutual aid can teach us to avoid dependency on the benisons of the state, or the helpless lassitude and cynicism that tend to settle upon us when we are organized primarily as consumers of the things of the market. It teaches us the real power of cooperation — a kind of humble awe for what ordinary people are capable of when self-organized. None of the other institutions can come close to what it teaches us about the yoking-together of our energies and the commonality of our fates.

And nothing can stand before the right and obligation of individual conscience and sovereignty over the self, the ultimate wellspring of moral judgment, arbiter of claims to legitimacy on the part of various kinds of collectivity, and guarantor of freedom.

I believe that it is only when these tools are held in the proper balance, and turned to the tasks to which they are best suited, that we’re truly able to thrive, as individuals and collectivities. It makes me a very curious sort of anarchist, admittedly, in that I do see valid roles for despised institutions like the state and the market. And it surely does feel naïve and baldly arrogant to imagine that there may still be some contribution to be made by positing a new balance of these functions at this late date. But while I’m sure you’ll correct me if I’m mistaken, or have overlooked something obvious, I just don’t recall, in all my reading, anyone ever having set things out quite this way. And I do think it will be a fruitful place for me, at least, to start in conceptualizing a useful balance of affordances and limitations in the design of a liberatory statecraft.

Well. It has been a long, long time coming, the book has inevitably evolved from my initial conception of it, and there’s still a great deal of work to be done. But I’m now in a position to at least let you know, in a fair amount of detail, just what The City Is Here For You To Use argues.

Please bear in mind that the following is not an outline, just an accounting of some of the book’s major propositions, in the rough order in which you’ll encounter them. As it happens, some of my favorite passages are acutely underrepresented in this accounting (particularly historical material and that concerning network technology’s implications for subjectivity and the constitution of a metropolitan, cosmopolitan self). What’s worse, a good deal of fairly carefully worked-out argumentation is here compressed into what are more or less bullet points. Unless you and I are already muy, muy simpatico, there’s no reason you should necessarily find all of the arguments as presented here convincing, nor do I expect you to. But I do want you to have a map of the line I’m going to be taking.

Without any further ado, then:

1. We find ourselves at a moment in history in which the nature of cities, as form and experience both, is under pressure from a particular class of emerging technology. The advent of lightweight, scalable, networked information-processing technologies means that urban environments around the world are now provisioned with the ability to gather, process, transmit, display and take physical action on data.

2. As a result, that which primarily conditions choice and action in urban places is no longer physical, but resides in an invisible and intangible overlay of digital information that enfolds the physical city. That is, our experiences in such places are no longer shaped exclusively, or even predominantly, by our physical surroundings, but by the interaction of code and data.

3. While it is impossible to know for certain just how much of the activity going on around us on any given street is there as the explicit result of a network sounding, it is clearly both a nontrivial and a growing percentage.

4. Our ability to use the city around us, our flexibility in doing so, just who is able to do so, will be shaped by decisions made about the technical design of objects and their human interfaces, and the precise ways in which such objects are connected to one another and made visible to the network.

5. There are many modes in which information raised to the network can re-enter the world. The most obvious is for that data to be mediated by a personal networked device, and acted upon at the level of individual choice and behavior.

6. A second clear category of interest is when this data populates urban media interfaces, which is to say the wide variety of shared, situated display and interaction surfaces of all sizes which increasingly layer urban space.

7. A third order of output is when data is expressed as a dynamic alteration to the physical form or other performative qualities of buildings, circulation networks and other infrastructural systems. We find ourselves in the liminal realm of physical form as the dynamic expression of some discrete measured condition.

8. Independent of the platform on which they’re displayed, the velocity and complexity of the data we are presented with suggests that it will increasingly be conveyed to us in the form of data visualizations that in and of themselves may be both dynamic and interactive.

9. An expansive range of everyday urban tasks currently mediated by analogue (or only passively networked) means, from physical access control to the ability to participate in economic transactions, are increasingly mediated by a single converged interface object, the smartphone…

10. …or disappearing into behavior altogether.

11. Just as Bourdieu argued that we learn the social roles and performances expected of us, in part, from our engagement with material and manufactured objects, we now learn those roles from our interactions with digital interfaces.

12. Digital placemaking tools etch away at the professions of architecture and urban planning, eroding their claim to sovereignty over the authorship of plan, movement and the capacity for transaction.

13. We increasingly share the space and time of cities with semi-autonomous agents of a nonhuman, indeed nonbiological, nature, from drones to algorithms.

14. These inevitably have their own embedded rhetorics and immanent logics.

15. Equally, there is a determinism implicit in the software used to design spatial relations, from 3D design packages to agent-based modeling tools.

16. The grandeur in determining the conditions of urban existence increasingly resides with those who produce networked objects and services and the interfaces to them.

17. The technologies we are concerned with here achieve their effect not as discrete objects, but as functional ensembles.

18. In many ways, the capabilities and affordances associated with any given ensemble remain distressingly hard to understand, even to people exposed to them on a daily basis.

19. A strong motivator for the deployment of these technologies is the idea that they will render previously obscure, occult and opaque urban processes transparent to inquiry, and therefore actionable.

20. For a variety of reasons, technologists have tended to treat the environments in which the things they design are deployed as what Deleuze called “any-space-whatever”: abstract, generic, unconditioned spaces, containing infinite potentials for connection. But as insightful observers of technology like Paul Dourish and Malcolm McCullough have pointed out, this isn’t so, and can never be: space is always some particular space, systems are always given meaning by being situated in a specific locale and human community, with all the limitations and constraints which go along with those things.

21. Conversely, of course, the urbanists that might have supplied technologists with vital corrective insight have tended to be correspondingly far from the cutting edge of technical development.

22. These technologies are at present offered to us in two guises: the smartphone app and the smart city. Neither is satisfactory.

23. The smart city, as currently proposed, exists almost solely for the benefit of managerial elites.

24. The smart city is situated in “the proximate future.”

25. The smart city pretends to a perfect knowledge that is nowhere achievable, even in principle.

26. The smart city replicates in substance most if not all of the blunders we associate with the discredited high-modernist urban planning techniques of the twentieth century.

27. The smart city and similar schemes tend to rely on a model that hardwires or literally embeds technical devices and systems too deeply in the urban fabric to accommodate the rate of change we observe in such systems. (The componentry that affords us an informatic service layer will tend to evolve far more quickly than the structural support in which it is housed. Cities ought therefore be designed to accommodate ready maintenance and the constant swapping-out of hardware.)

28. The smart city is predicated on a neoliberal political economy, and in particular presents a set of potentials disturbingly consonant with the exercise of authoritarianism.

29. Most damningly, the smart city has little enough to do with cities.

30. Latent in the ideology underwriting the smart city is the notion that there is one universal and transcendently correct solution to each identified individual or collective human need, and that this solution can be arrived at algorithmically.

31. We should demand to know precisely which models of everyday life, subjectivity and experience are implicit in the smart city.

32. There is an inherent tension between technologies that achieve their beneficial effect only at network scale, and therefore benefit from or even require top-down imposition, and the imperatives and prerogatives of local autonomy.

33. The same set of underlying technical potentials that results in the (rhetorical or actual) performance of the smart city can be turned to far more interesting, vital and responsive ends. These meaningful alternatives can best be realized when organized according to the “small pieces, loosely joined” logic so decisive in securing the uptake of the World Wide Web.

34. A set of technical preconditions exists, which Anthony Townsend has identified as (free or low-cost) robust broadband connectivity; (free or low-cost) personal network-interface devices, of wide availability; fully public interfaces; a robust cloud-computing infrastructure, such that storage and information processing are pulled off of local devices; and, at the policy level, an equally robust commitment to open municipal data.

35. Of course, the data is never “just” the data, not at any point a neutral, objective quantity.

36. Firstly, we measure what can be measured.

37. As Laura Kurgan has pointed out, we measure the quantities that it is politically expedient to measure, or which signify against the metrics and success criteria that between them constitute our incentive landscape.

38. We deploy the sensors that are cheap to deploy.

39. Above all, we measure what we think to measure, looking for explanations in some places and not others.

40. There is always contingency, always a selection process, always a choice of what to gather…and always decisions made by some historical agent about how to label, characterize and represent the information that does get collected.

41. We move toward a time in which every change of state, every transaction, every mediated conversation transpiring in the cities of the developed world is, at least in principle, capable of being captured and retained by the network, assigned some meaning, and grabbed, manipulated and acted upon by some remote system.

42. Where previously human and other processes in the urban fold were lost to insight and to history, the contemporary city’s rhythms speak themselves.

43. Even seemingly innocuous facts or patterns of fact, when subjected to relational, inferential and predictive analytics, may be brought to bear against us in distressing and unforeseeable ways, such nonobvious linkages particularly leading to transitive closure and the revelation of identity.

44. These technologies redefine surveillance. It is no longer something which takes place exclusively, or even primarily, in the audio and visual registers, or, for that matter, in real time.

45. We must henceforth understand surveillance as something that can be assembled retroactively, on demand and in response to an emergent perception of need.

46. When discussing surveillance, and the use of power/knowledge to police and constrain behavior, historically most concerns have centered on the state and its capabilities. We must now extend the ambit of our concern to include both market entities and the collectivity of our peers.

47. As ever, the salient thing is not whether some technical capability exists, but whether some party believes that it does, sufficiently to act upon that belief.

48. The discrete objects that gather information and furnish it to the network are acutely sensitive to the alteration of parameters relating either to their design or their deployment.

49. As Anna Minton has observed, the presence of certain kinds of surveillant artifact in the streetscape empirically diminishes personal safety, by eroding the sense of mutual responsibility that is otherwise the hallmark of an organically functioning neighborhood.

50. New visualization tools endow us with what amounts to an extended sensorium, but only at the risk of privileging the perspectives they encode over others which may well be more salient to the situation at hand. There is a danger that our tools will seduce us into believing we understand the flow of things better than we do, or can.

51. Because predictive analytics are all too often based on straight-line extrapolations from present behavior, they can fail to account for perturbations that knock a metastable system out of its present state and into another basin of stability.

52. Networked technologies erode our long-standing conceptions of public and private space. Instead of “public,” perhaps we are better off constructing these as places one can reasonably expect one’s behavior to be observed.

53. Instead of “private,” by the same token, perhaps we can consider such to be places where behavior, once observed, has a very high probability of being correlated with one’s identity.

54. We are now in a position to see that any meaningful distinction between such spaces is collapsing.

55. The risks to individual privacy posed by the contemporary networked streetscape and the objects in it is compounded by the personal devices we carry voluntarily.

56. Mediated digitally as they now are, many of the activities that constitute the public sphere have evaporated from the public realm, leaving the destiny of our public spaces uncertain.

57. Networked objects capable of collecting information from public space can usefully be placed on a spectrum of concern, evaluated by whether they do not store captured data, store it locally in a persistent manner, or upload it to the network…

58. …allow analytics to be applied to collected data or not…

59. …what their effective range and domain of action is…

60. …whether or not meaningful provisions for consent to and opt-out of attempts at collection are present…

61. …and whether or not there is a clear and immediate public good served by the collection.

62. As presently constructed, certain such deployments represent a unidirectional and involuntary transfer of value from individuals moving through public space to private concerns unknown to them.

63. Coming to terms with the fact that a very wide range of everyday objects and surfaces in our cities will have the capacities discussed here will require a new conception of them as open informational utilities: public objects.

64. What is a “public object”? Any artifact located in or bounding upon public rights-of-way…

65. …Any discrete object in the common spatial domain, intended for the use and enjoyment of the general public…

66. …Any discrete object which is de facto shared by and accessible to the public, regardless of its ownership or original intention.

67. The data streams collected by such objects should, within reason, be open, free, accessible and extensible. You should certainly be able to draw data out of them, and — so long as those functions represent no public harm — to run other functions on top of them.

68. We might more rigorously define the aim here as ensuring that the goods produced by public object data collection are nonrivalrous and nonexclusive.

69. Given the rapidity with which software evolves, it may be exceedingly difficult to subject systems where power/knowledge is brought to bear by provisions resident in code (rather than in discrete hardware) to processes of democratic accountability.

70. Provided with such functionality, urban space itself becomes capable of performing sorting and ordering operations, including differential exclusions with little or no effective recourse in real time.

71. Increasingly, the systems we are exposed to treat us as temporary and contingent aggregates of “dividuals,” distinguished from one another and laminated together only in the act and moment of inquiry. In the absence of traditional markers of mutual in-group recognition and solidarity, it may be difficult for such dividuals to recognize that they do in fact constitute a class.

72. Cities, with their density and diversity, generate two profound goods for free: enhanced information exchange and transactive capacity…

73. …and the forging, through friction, dissensus and the constant exposure to difference, of a metropolitan self.

74. The ability to trivially search the space of a city is leaching away at the constitution of a quality we have always recognized as urban savvy or savoir faire.

75. The persistent retrievability of personal information is undermining the city’s capacity to act as a chrysalis for personal reinvention.

76. Technologies like high-resolution positioning and algorithmic facial recognition are destroying any promise of anonymity we thought the metropolis afforded.

77. Cities depend vitally on informal, illicit, even deviant economies, which are threatened by a regime of eternal, total and trivial visibility.

78. The wish to protect, preserve or even enhance these qualities, when the technologies we now have at hand would seem to cut against them in ordinary use, furnishes us with several clear design desiderata for networked urban systems.

79. Transfer of the tools of placemaking — particularly the ability to make and publish maps — from empowered elites to the general public represents a profound recasting of spatial knowing. The ability to be represented (or, to some degree, to resist representation) is now in popular hands.

80. Equally, the advent of maps that tell you where you are on them represents a profound epistemic break from the entire history of cartography to date.

81. Our conceptions of lived, bodily space and the simultaneity and capacity of time are almost casually transformed by our everyday use of networked artifacts.

82. Many of the things our new tools tell us about the places we live will be circumstances we’re not quite ready to face up to.

83. Equally, these technologies present us with the specter of new and unforeseen failure modes. Such defaults may affect us in multiple registers simultaneously.

84. The ability for any person to physically travel to and occupy any public space of the city at any time of their choosing and without confronting challenge is an absolute precondition for any meaningfully articulated “right to the city.”

85. The present panoply of heterogeneous transportation networks we encounter in most cities cannot accommodate this requirement. They must therefore be bound together in a mesh of finely-grained and fully interoperable networked services — a transmobility field. Information is the substance of this new urban mobility.

86. The ability to claim unoccupied or unutilized space, at least temporarily, by the act of creative use is vital to any meaningful contemporary conception of a “right to the city,” most especially in so-called “shrinking cities.”

87. Present land-use policies and practices cannot accommodate this requirement. Parcels available on short-term, temporary, contingent or negotiated bases ought therefore be made discoverable via a networked service, such that both market and nonmarket service models are accommodated: space as a service.

88. The ability of citizens to enjoy the same real-time synoptic visibility over the unfolding processes of the city available to any manager is vital to any meaningful contemporary conception of a “right to the city.”

89. Present deployments of information technology, especially as made manifest in so-called intelligent operations centers, do not accommodate this requirement. Such consolidated awareness ought therefore be made available via open, shared platforms: frameworks for citizen engagement.

90. The ability to deploy vetted and reliable real-time information in support of collective self-determination is vital to any meaningful contemporary conception of a “right to the city.”

91. Present decision-making procedures, even in places under democratic governance, cannot accommodate this requirement. We ought therefore devise and install, at the lowest reasonable level, a populist deliberative process capable of harnessing networked information, bringing it to bear on challenges before the community and focusing dissensus where it is most productive: evidence-based citizenship.

92. The frictions and constraints that act to keep novel technosocial potentials from bedding in are almost never of a technical nature, but are rather institutional, regulatory and legal.

93. Though some of these constraints may certainly exist for good historical reasons, there is at present an odd and potentially temporary confluence of interests between those invested in a neoliberal retreat of the state from the provision of services and those holding an affirmative vision of collective self-determination.

94. Given the drag generally imposed on government informatics by the unwieldy combination of lowest-bidder procurement policies, the requirement for compatibility with legacy systems and elephantine IT bureaucracies, we stand on the threshold of a world in which the ordinary citizen has recourse to data-gathering, -processing and -visualization tools at least as good as, and often considerably superior to, those which local governmental institutions can bring to bear on a problem.

95. This is especially true when citizen information-processing resources are used in the aggregate.

96. As yet, the majority of urban places and things appear to the network only via passive representations. The networked city cannot come into its own until these are reconceived as a framework of active resources, each endowed with some manner of structured, machine-readable presence, and the possibilities for interaction such provisions give rise to.

97. It is only by consciously and carefully transforming the urban landscape into a meshwork of open and available resources that we can find some upside in the colonization of everyday life by information technology. Such resources ought to be maintained as elements of a core common infrastructure.

98. If place derives its meaning from phenomenology, capacity and history, the technologies under consideration here operate in all three registers.

99. The city is not a finite state machine, something with limited configurations. Networked cities, therefore, must be understood as constituting a grammar that admits to a very large number of valid permutations. Understood correctly, any such place will be ripe with potential for interconnection, recombination and improvisatory structuration — something capable of being extended, enhanced and repurposed by its users as new potentials become available and new desires arise.

100. Considerations, then, for a city and a world newly clothed in code. If we admittedly find ourselves amidst this set of circumstances without much having planned on it, how we respond — what we do now, what cities we make of the potentials before us — is still largely up to us. Now as never before, the city is here for you to use.

- Tao te Ching, tr. M. LaFargue. (For the record, I prefer the Stephen Mitchell translation, but this seemed more pointedly relevant to the work at hand.)

Even before its surge hit New York City on October 29th, Hurricane Sandy was already unusual. The lead winds of the late-season storm — the largest Atlantic hurricane on record — had begun to fuse with a existing continental front, into something vastly larger and weirder. The combined system would go on to linger in the Northeast for days, stretching our ordinary expectations of a weather event to the breaking point and earning the label of “superstorm.”

But it was the surge, when it came, that redrew the maps. Low-lying areas of New York City, from the beach communities of outer Queens to the West Side of Manhattan, suddenly found themselves part of the Atlantic, as brackish water flooded into basements, subway tunnels, utility vaults and substations. And despite all the backups and failovers and carefully-devised redundancies, the sensitive systems that underwrite the everyday life of our city went down, and stayed down for days.

You know all this, of course. It was instant history, part of the record of our times even while it was happening. And like every other New Yorker, Nurri and I felt it. (For me personally, among the strangest things I experienced was the giddy, dis-placing shock of seeing that the global networks’ routine disaster-porn-of-the-moment was footage of an intersection visible from our own window.) But once the power came back in our neighborhood, it was acutely clear that we got off lightly — really, the worst of it for us was having to throw out a refrigerator-load of spoiled food, a few meals’ worth, maybe a hundred dollars in replacement value all told. This was a feather-touch by comparison with how others fared, and I’m not even talking about people who lost their lives to the tidal surge or the chaos that followed.

In New York City alone, hundreds of thousands of households found themselves without power, light, heat or potable water. Tens of thousands of elderly people and others with limited mobility were stranded on high floors, in buildings where elevator service might not be restored for a week or more. Entire housing projects were left to fend for themselves — in many cases, it must be pointed out, because those responsible for their care and maintenance were stranded offsite by the collapse of the regional transportation network. Attempts to right that network struggled against acute and immediate fuel shortages, amid forty-block lines and spreading mayhem at gas stations. And, in true insult-to-injury style, as only reality at its most implacable can manage, there was barely time for anyone to internalize any of this before an early cold snap settled onto the area.

One bright light in all of this, though, was the effective response. Thankfully, in the aftermath of the superstorm there was an organization capable of standing up a network of intake, coordination and distribution centers and starting relief operations almost immediately. This organization funnelled an enormous quantity of donated goods and supplies out to the hardest-hit areas, ensuring that thousands of New Yorkers were sheltered, warmed and fed, and provided crew after crew of volunteers willing to take on the difficult, dirty, and occasionally dangerous job of site clearance.

Help from below

As it happens, the organization responsible was neither a government agency nor a charitable effort of any kind. It was a spontaneous, self-organized initiative put together by veterans of the Occupy Wall Street movement and the occupation of Zuccotti Park in the fall of 2011, consciously guided by the ideals of that movement and assembled under the banner of Occupy Sandy. Occupy Sandy’s effectiveness constitutes both powerfully impressive testimony as to what ordinary people can achieve when organized in a horizontal, leaderless, distributed and consciously egalitarian network, and a rebuke to the seeming inability of the centralized, hierarchical and bureaucratic organizations to which our society has hitherto entrusted mission-critical disaster recovery functions to cope with what this responsibility demands of them. (Equally interestingly, to me anyway, it also stands as an implicit critique of some of the tactical and strategic missteps made during the original OWS, but that’s a story for a different day.)

Even putting matters of ideology to the side for a moment, though, Occupy Sandy was simply the easiest, fastest and most effective way for an ordinary, unaffiliated New Yorker to get involved with the relief effort. That I am aware of, it was the only organization that had meaningful and productive things for people without specialized skills to do in the days immediately following the storm, with the capacity to handle the massive volume of volunteers, donations and contributions and the network to get those materials and energies where they could do the most good.

For us personally, both factors counted. My wife is among the sincerest, most self-sacrificing and spontaneously giving people I’ve ever met; she would have walked to the Rockaways if it had been asked of her, but she wanted to do something that would count. I think it’s fair to say that I’m both a whole lot lazier than she is and, as a veteran of organizations like ACT UP Philadelphia and the Berkeley Free Clinic, relatively more motivated by and attuned to a specifically antiauthoritarian politics.

So Occupy Sandy ticked both our boxes. As soon after the storm as we were able to, then, we went down to the main distribution hub OS had set up in the sanctuary of the Church of St Luke and St Matthew, at 520 Clinton Avenue, on the border of Fort Greene and Prospect Heights. After we ourselves had undergone a brief orientation, we jumped right in, spending the rest of the day breaking down boxes, doing greeting, getting newcomers into the database, and working as links in a bucket brigade, moving bags and packages from the stream of cars clogging Clinton Avenue into the impromptu warehousing operation that had been set up in the pews of the church. We left tired, dirty and hungry, but — I’ll speak for myself — fulfilled in some pretty deep ways the ordinary experience of my life doesn’t really address.

I was able to devote another day to volunteering this past week, and it was the same again. This work is hugely satisfying — so much so that, despite my urgent need to finish writing the book I’ve been working on for the last four years, I’ve been fighting off the urge to blow that effort off and spend my days helping out at 520. In many ways, it feels like the most important thing I’ve ever been a part of, however small that contribution is.

Of the many aspects of the Occupy Sandy relief effort that have impressed me, though, the foremost is just how resourceful the site coordinators have been, how truly incredible a job they’ve done in fusing a stream of potentially incoherent energies and ambitions into the clear flow of an effective (dare I even say “efficient”?) relief operation, and, actually, how relatively little I’ve seen in the way of wasted time or effort.

I have a great deal of experience with both nonhierarchical/leaderless and top-down, command-and-control institutions — as canonical, in each case, as ACT UP and the US Army — and I have rarely seen such highly functional order assemble itself so rapidly. When I have seen the near equivalent, I think it’s worth mentioning that it’s been in the context of a standing organization dedicated to practicing for contingencies, where individuals are assigned given tasks and roles and repeat action drills relevant to these tasks until they’re inscribed pre-consciously, at the level of muscle memory. For this kind of order to arise spontaneously, in the absence of much in the way of a pre-existing institutional framework, unguided by a context-specific protocol or doctrine, in the wake of a significant natural disaster, strikes me as nothing short of astounding.

(It’s true that Occupy Sandy did not start from zero. The relationships, networks and linkages forged in the previous fall’s struggle were pivotal in allowing a widely-scattered community of activists to constitute themselves as a relief effort in short order, and, as we’ll see, it turns out not to be incidental that relief operations were infused with their values.)

Knowledge in the head, and in the world

But if this bottom-up, self-assembling syndicate achieved its impressive degree of operational effectiveness despite the inevitable reduplications of effort, suboptimal decisions, communication breakdowns and confusions that attended Sandy’s “fog of war,” how much more capable would it be once things had slowed down a bit, and the people involved had a chance to revisit those decisions? How could they redesign the interaction of functional subsystems to result in the most effective use of resources, and then describe this design in such a way as to allow it to be replicated elsewhere?

Those of you who know me well won’t be surprised that among other things, I understand the longer-term propagation of a site like 520 Clinton as, in part, a challenge in knowledge management. What works in setting up a relief hub, and what doesn’t? (Or, restated to account for nonlinearity: What works gorgeously above some threshold of intensity, but oughtn’t be trifled with under any circumstances short of that threshold?) Whatever the textbook answers may be, after three solid weeks of continuous effort, I would imagine that the nonspecialists in disaster relief who are Occupy Sandy bodily and make it what it is can address these questions at least as authoritatively as any “expert,” from hard-won knowledge born out of practical experience under actual crisis conditions.

Is there a way to get the most valuable insights out of the heads of these incredible human beings? Can we get that knowledge out into the world, into some format that’s both robust (so it’s less vulnerable to disruption), widely transmissible (so others can make best use of it) and user-editable (so it accounts for evolution and change)?

Ordinarily, sure. The trouble is that much of this knowledge is what we call tacit — that is, so deeply embedded in the mesh of experiences, spaces and relations that produced it that it’s not particularly amenable to rapid transfer. In a very real sense, nobody can tell you “this is how 520 Clinton works.”

If you had the time, and the active participation of the people you were interested in studying, you might submit a situation like this to a rigorous process of ethnographic observation, contextual inquiry and documentation. You’d produce a thick description accounting for the site, the people you found there, and the tools you observed them to use, and you’d take a great degree of care in capturing all these artifacts, processes and linkages and explaining their interrelation in a methodical and comprehensive fashion.

Or you can do what I did, and just start diagramming the thing.

Between last week and this, with the cheerful help of everyone I spoke to (and particular thanks to Easton, Lev and Caitlin), I’ve begun to map the process flow at 520 Clinton: to identify the site’s major discrete functions, chart the flow of people, material, information and other resources between them, and identify any blockages or breakdowns in these flows. The rest of this post consists of preliminary notes toward just such a map.

Why? I go into more detail about my own motivations, aims and goals toward the end of this piece, but my immediate intention was to address the following two questions:

- Can 520 Clinton’s functionality be successfully replicated elsewhere? Can the flow of human knowledge that drives this site meaningfully be abstracted from place? Are aspects of praxis utterly dependent on the precise arrangement of doors and pews and steps in this one particular sanctuary, or is it portable?

- To some degree, can mission-critical roles and responsibilities be decoupled from individual personalities?

On the one hand, you want to celebrate that OS is animated by specific, distinct people; that’s one of the things that makes this effort different from walking into a McDonald’s, or engaging in any of the very wide variety of other routinized, scripted, focus-grouped interactions we experience in contemporary life. Instead of an interaction conceived of as a “touchpoint,” the most wonderful thing about OS is asking a question and getting “I dunno, talk to Sparky,” or “Anna’s managing that” in reply. Without sentimentalizing anything, it’s clear that the people you meet are here for their own reasons and are guided in action by their own lights, not because they’ve substituted some script in a three-ring binder (or any of the other impedimenta of service-design fuckery) for individual introspection, initiative, belief and motivation.

But what happens when those wonderful human beings collapse from overwork and lack of sleep? When they get sick? When they burn out? Or, as has been known to happen from time to time, when someone who’s promised to take on some responsibility simply flakes out?

One of the easier ways to protect against this is to instill an ethic of shadowing, so the person responsible for a given task is always training their replacement, and the knowledge necessary to do the job eventually comes to live among several people, and not just with a single, potentially indispensible individual. This is simple and effective, and it tends to promote a few other valuable qualities as well. But it doesn’t particularly help you with getting to scale, or replicating across multiple sites, especially if you’re confronted with a need for rapid expansion.

I believe that, ideally, everything necessary to getting a site like this up and running would be handled at the level of personal relationships, with enough time and space for people to work things out for themselves, in whatever way they found most appropriate to their local culture and context. But time and space are luxuries you don’t always have, and I can imagine a number of circumstances in which some kind of written procedure might be helpful. Ever mindful of the tensions inherent in such abstraction, then, I nonetheless offer the follow schematic description of the process flow I witnessed, with the expectation that it will be adapted, challenged, pushed back against and departed from, but with the hope that you will find it useful.

The basic structure of a distribution site

Everything that follows is derived from my direct observation of the 520 Clinton distribution hub at the end of the first and beginning of the second week after the storm, and may not reflect the experience of people working at Jacobi, the relief sites themselves, or other Occupy Sandy activities. (Indeed, given the speed with which things are changing, it may not reflect reality at 520 Clinton anymore.) Major functional areas are set in CAPITALS.

If you were to draw a diagram of activity at 520, among the very first and most prominent things on the page would be two thick lines flowing inward, representing streams of incoming volunteers and materiel. Helping people get situated, both practically and conceptually, is the task of GREETING, REGISTRATION & ORIENTATION, while managing the influx of donated goods is the responsibility of the INTAKE team. There’s also ordinarily a coordinator dedicated to TRAFFIC CONTROL. We’ll deal with each of these tasks separately.

- Whoever takes on GREETING, REGISTRATION & ORIENTATION will have to cope with the arrival of people — on a busy weekend day, quite possibly dozens at once — who know nothing more about Occupy Sandy than that they’re there and they want to help. As I mentioned, in a great many cases the volunteers showing up had no prior ideological commitment whatsoever to the Occupy movement; I talked to more than a few who had earlier tried to volunteer with the Red Cross and had been turned away, and for whom this was simply the best option they had remaining for making meaningful use of their time.

We’ll get to a discussion of ideology in a moment, but the very first thing I want to point out is that when Nurri and I arrived at the site, we spent less than ten seconds meandering cluelessly on the sidewalk in front of the church before someone greeted us with a smile, asked if we were here to volunteer, and guided us smoothly to the desk where they were getting people signed up. I obviously can’t promise that everyone’s experience will be the same, but for us it really was that friendly and that efficient. I’ve been to seven-star hotels that didn’t do nearly as good a job of making me feel welcome.

After this GREETING, we were swiftly ushered into the process of REGISTRATION. The spatial provision made for this is simple: it consists of a folding table where people can make themselves a nametag, with Sharpie marker and one of the strips of white duct tape that someone had thoughtfully pre-cut and laid out on the desk. Even this seemingly very basic step had a certain ideological logic to it, though: people working with OS are universally known by their first name or nickname, and there’s something appealingly democratic about it. It’s kind of nice to find, amidst a process like this, that you’re Adam, and not Sergeant Greenfield. You wind up using people’s names a lot, which I belatedly realized that I’d gotten out of the habit of doing.

And even here, in the tape and marker, there’s a lesson about expedient means, about making do with what you have, and, if you think just a little more deeply about it, how the existence of a cheap (and generally Chinese-made) commodity can so easily have the effect of suppressing individual initiative. I did hear one or two people wondering if they oughtn’t just run down to the Office Depot and buy a bunch of pre-printed hello-my-name-is nametags instead of spending time cutting strips of duct tape to size, but it didn’t take much to dissuade them.

- After fixing themselves a nametag, the next thing that arriving volunteers are asked to do is ensure that their information is entered in the OS database, at the REGISTRATION desk. The form is straightforward, capturing contact information, availability, and whether the volunteer possesses specialized skills — i.e. medical, legal, construction or demolition experience; fluency in Spanish or Russian. When I first arrived, this was handled via three laptops all drawing from a mobile hotspot taped to the desk, but the details have varied; people with smartphones were asked to use them to register. (NB: I found this very difficult to accomplish on my iPhone, and so gave up and took up space on one of the laptops. It may be that when there’s the chance, someone ought to look into a mobile-optimized version of the registration page.)

That I saw, anyway, greeters were always careful to mention that immediately after they’d entered their data on the website, but before getting tasked with anything substantive, volunteers would be asked to attend a brief ORIENTATION session. Though it was indeed brief, and for me the furthest thing from bothersome, I personally believe that it would be more accurate to refer to this as process as “indoctrination.” I want to make it clear that while this is a chilly and rather off-putting word in most contexts, I do not in the slightest mean it pejoratively. In plain words, that is what is happening here, and there’s not a damn thing wrong with it.

I believe that it’s entirely appropriate for a movement founded on core tenets of anti-oppression to ask would-be volunteers to understand those tenets, to explain that expressions of sexism, racism, classism or homophobia would not be tolerated, and to emphasize that people unable to let go of such viewpoints would most likely be more comfortable elsewhere. What I found somewhat more striking was the immediate insistence that what is happening at 520 Clinton and the other OS sites is mutual aid, and precisely not charity, followed by a brief discussion of what the difference implies for the longevity of relief efforts and the relations of power inscribed in them. I found this very moving, personally, and while like everyone I couldn’t wait to dive in to the real work, I stood through the orientation spiel with a shit-eating grin.

At 520 the ORIENTATION process has had to accommodate groups from five on up to about twenty people, so this process requires somewhere this many people can stand comfortably for ten minutes or so, within easily audible range of a coordinator speaking at no more than conversational volume. I have seen this take place in the choir of the church, on the sidewalk out front and in a grassy area immediately inside the low fence, with varying results. On completion of ORIENTATION, volunteers are immediately released for TASKING (with certain exceptions; see the following).

There’s plenty of work to be done in the various processes that take place at the hub itself, but many volunteers have of course arrived with the expectation of getting their hands dirty “in the field,” i.e. at recovery sites. People wanting to do so are first asked to attend a more comprehensive FIELD ORIENTATION; similarly those wanting to will be asked to complete DRIVER ORIENTATION. I haven’t been able to attend either of these so far, but going from what I’ve overheard these strongly resemble a typical safety briefing.

- Many of the volunteers arrive via personal cars or trucks that they expect and badly want to be of use in the relief effort, but are surprised to be confronted with even the relatively minimal ORIENTATION process in place, and haven’t considered what to do with their vehicle while this is going on. Drivers carrying relief supplies may arrive and immediately begin offloading. For the predictable variety of reasons, the street in front of 520 is always congested. In order to prevent this from becoming an issue, then — particularly if it threatens to tail back to the point that it blocks the intersection of Clinton with arterial Fulton Street, and attract the attention of the police — there needs to be at least one coordinator responsible for TRAFFIC CONTROL available to manage the flow of vehicles at all times. Given the lack of line of sight between the street and the functions performed inside the church, it’s obviously preferable if TRAFFIC CONTROL can remain in constant radio communication with DISPATCH and STAGING.

- Donations of food, clothing and other goods are carried (individually or by bucket brigade) inside the church, to a INTAKE and SORTING area that has remained to the left of the aisle. Things that will be useful to the KITCHEN are brought there immediately; the remainder are moved toward STAGING, where they will be formed into shipments requested by DISPATCH, in preparation for release to the recovery sites.

Most of what comes in does so in break-bulk form; it’s not at all unusual to get, say, a heavy-duty trash bag containing a foam pillow, eight different cans of food (for people and pets both), some packaged nine-volt batteries and a box of adult diapers. (As annoying as it might be to handle, that’s actually a relatively thoughtful and useful donation.) If you are lucky enough that DISPATCH has a site that needs just those things, or some close approximation thereof, it doesn’t even enter the system. It goes straight out to a waiting car. In most cases, though, there’s some necessity of SORTING the incoming goods, making sure perishables get used in a timely manner, STAGING of outgoing shipments is simplified, and recovery sites get what they need.

In its basic outlines, 520 can be thought of as a warehousing operation, with the relative luxury of operating on a just-in-time basis. None of this inventory gets sat on for terribly long. It comes in, it gets sorted, it goes out. To date, that I’ve seen, there hasn’t even been any need for inventory management and control, though if you had an eye on the long game that is definitely something you’d want to be thinking about fairly soon now.

Under the general heading of INTAKE, the distinction between SORTING and STAGING has varied with time, volume of incoming materiel, demand from the field sites, and, frankly, with who I was talking to. Some people definitely perceive a difference in these roles and in the areas allocated to them; others do not. (For my own part, it seems useful to think of them as two separate functions and to address them in spatially discrete locations, however close by one another prudence may suggest arranging them.)

- Again, folks with any experience whatsoever in logistics will instantly recognize that what people are running in each of the OS Distro hubs amounts to a spontaneously-organized order fulfillment and shipping system, complete with the artifacts any such place necessarily runs on (e.g. picking-and-packing labels). For Occupy Sandy, the heart of this system is the DISPATCH desk, which works from a master spreadsheet shared with the COMMS team, the KITCHEN and the other hubs (see notes on technology below).

The process involves a lot of moving parts and a number of different teams, but there’s nothing in it so complex that it can’t be described straightforwardly. Incoming requests for relief from the community (there’s another thick line for your process diagram) are parried initially by the COMMS team, who start up a new row in the spreadsheet for each. This includes cells detailing what kind of request this is, what specific goods or skills are being called for, where and when they are needed, and so forth. One or another hub’s DISPATCH team will claim the incoming task, color-coding it to indicate that it has done so, and passing it on to STAGING via that most robust and ubiquitous of technologies, the index card. Each index card bears the time, location and contact information of the aid request on its front, and a packing slip on its back. The shipment is put together, a coordinator assembles the necessary volunteers, driver(s) and vehicle(s), and out the shipment goes.

As the core of Occupy Sandy’s relief operations, this is a pretty well-oiled procedure, and that I saw, it seemed to work incredibly smoothly at 520 Clinton. What at least two people mentioned to me, however, is that the habit of closing the loop each time this is done — closing out each row in the spreadsheet and confirming each job as completed — hasn’t yet been internalized to the same degree as the other phases of the process.

[Note: To be updated with descriptions of the TASKING, KITCHEN, COMMUNICATIONS, and COORDINATION roles.]

Tensions and longer-term implications

A couple of observations:

- There are certainly things that a coordination and distribution center might legitimately do, functional areas that I haven’t see being explicitly addressed here, though perhaps in time they’ll emerge in response to felt need. Over the weeks of the Zuccotti occupation, a surprisingly robust and diversified service ecology grew up, complete with wayfinding and directional-signage infrastructure, so maybe that’s in the wind for 520 and its successors. (To that point, a side note: if anything, the graphic design is even more sophisticated this time around, less oriented to direct agitprop and more toward good practice for clarity, comprehensibility and actionability.)

- If you belong to a school group, a Girl Scout troop or similar, and you are not interested in going out to recovery sites, instead of showing up at the hub en masse, I hear that it would be more helpful if you put your energy into pre-sorting toiletry or blackout kits into Ziploc bags, so that every toothbrush comes with toothpaste, every hygiene kit has soap and tampons and moist wipes and so on. I know that if you or your group is able to do this, it’s extremely useful and very much appreciated. (You can volunteer your group via this online form.)

There is a basic tension here, though, that other kinds of relief organizations simply won’t be subject to. In many cases, the desirable logistical efficiency one realizes by, say, pre-packing personal hygiene kits runs straight into the ethic of mutual aid, which demands we treat aid recipients not as victims to be rescued but as neighbors and equals. This is a time- and labor-intensive process. It’s unavoidably effortful, because it involves respectfully asking people what they understand themselves as needing: “I understand you haven’t had heat here for a few days — how are you dealing with that? How’s that working for you?” The Red Cross can drop a pallet of blankets on your porch and feel like they’ve done their job, maybe. An OS volunteer can’t.

So do you choose to observe pragmatism and efficiency in the operational stewardship of limited resources, or do you remind yourself that thinking of people as abstract “resources” is one of the habits of mind that’s led us to the precipice we now find ourselves standing before? Again, no National Guardsman I’ve ever met is likely to burn cycles pondering such questions. But I’m sure as hell going to, and judging from some of the people I’ve met at 520, I won’t be the only one.

- Networked information technology is critical to the success of this effort, though not in the precise places, ways and modes you might assume. Cloud-based applications, specifically Google Docs, are absolutely core components of the operational workflow. Conversely, the technologically-inclined may be surprised to learn that wikis have remained a starkly underutilized channel of information sharing, even in applications to which they’re ideally suited. And while you might think tablets had evolved to the point that they’d be useful in this context for data entry, if nothing else, using an iPad felt like much more hassle than it was worth. DISPATCH uses those index cards for a reason, and it’s the same reason I wound up resorting to a good old-fashioned legal pad to take these notes. (I will confess that I briefly entertained the notion of a Kickstarter project to develop a stripped-down, open-source, hardened tablet with some of the basic functionality you’d require for running ongoing stability operations — an OccuPad! — and then good sense got the better of me.)

None dare call it anarchy

I promised I’d say a little bit more about my own motivations in putting this all together.

I have three goals. The first is fulfilled immediately the moment I hit “post.” I’ll be addressing the second, as you’ll see, over the next few months, and this post is just the first installment of that work. The last is the kind of goal you only ever work toward on an incremental basis, over a period of time that may well extend longer than any one human life.

My close-range goal is simply to make some material contribution to the discussion around Occupy — a flawed movement I however believe to be, for those of us in the United States, the largest, broadest-based, most sustained and most productive antiauthoritarian current we are likely to experience in our lifetimes. I was struggling desperately to keep my practice afloat during the occupation of Zuccotti, and wasn’t at that time able to participate as anything much more than a body in the crowd. I don’t intend to miss a second opportunity.

My medium-range aim is to help enable the Occupy Sandy community — and the Occupy movement and its allies more generally — produce resources I think of as distro-hub-in-a-box and relief-site-in-a-box. You could interpret this quite literally — I’m imagining something like a Pelican case, containing everything you’d need to get a site up and running, with a laminated sheet explaining how it all fits together duct-taped inside the lid — or more metaphorically, as a basic set of diagrams, guidelines and pragmas aimed at serving the same end: this is where INTAKE goes, you’ll need a place where SORTING happens, this is how we found DISPATCH works best, and so on. Either way, the intention is to provide those facing the terrible challenge of helping their communities recover from large-scale disasters like Sandy with some means of benefitting from New York’s experience, and to do so in a way that’s consonant with the values of autonomy and self-determination at the heart of this effort.

Finally, and again, speaking only for myself, I’m clear that my own longer-term goal is to serve the development of a permanent regional mutual-aid infrastructure here in New York, tuned not just to the needs of recovery from a disaster but of ongoing evolution and growth.

It was painful for me to read the following, in the New York Times‘s coverage of Occupy Sandy:

That sort of response has rankled Nicole Rivera, 47, who lives in a project in Arverne, where the ocean sand still swirls up the street with every passing vehicle. “It’s sad, sometimes it’s a little degrading,” she said as she stood in line in a parking lot waiting for free toiletries.

Ms. Rivera said that she was thankful for the help, but that its face — mostly white, middle- and upper-class people — made her bitter.

“The only time you recognize us is when there’s some disaster,” she said. “Since this happened, it’s: ‘Let’s help the black people. Let’s run to their rescue.’”

“Why wait for tragedy?” she added. “People suffer every day with this.”

A woman standing in front of her in line interjected. “To be honest, I pray to God I never see these people again,” the woman said. “The only reason these people would be out here again for us is if something like this happens again, or worse.”

To which my only possible response is that Nicole Rivera, you’re both wrong and right. You’re wrong in that, from what I have seen, I don’t think anyone involved with OS is particularly motivated by condescension or stoking up their own ego. I haven’t met any pernicious do-gooders at 520, and trust me, I’d know them if I saw them. (One or two folks, yeah, who drove up with sparkling SUVs full of freshly-purchased Home Depot supplies, and wanted everyone to know just how much time, money and effort they’d put into helping out. What are you going to do, send them packing? No, you thank them for their contribution, explain a little bit about the difference between mutual aid and charity, and invite them to get involved.)

But you’re right in that the emergency in a whole lot of people’s lives is ongoing — is structural and endemic and as close to permanent as makes no meaningful difference. Or it would be, if we went back to our lives of (relative or absolute) privilege, and only showed up again the next time a storm hit.

If disaster capitalism means taking advantage of massively disruptive climatic or economic events to swoop in and compel governments to accept string-laden loans, adopt punitive Structural Adjustment Programs and the like, I’m equally wary of what we might call “disaster anarchism.” The most important thing is, always, to acknowledge people’s suffering, and extend to them whatever concrete means they’re likely to find useful in relieving that suffering. So it’s not without a little queasiness that I admit to perceiving the aftermath of Sandy as an opportunity it would be foolish to waste.

This is what, I would argue, the Occupy movement should have evolved into in the first place, a year ago: an ongoing effort to create a fabric of community institutions that live their beliefs matter-of-factly, so that people can experience for themselves the difference between what it feels like to be a consumer and what it feels like to actually participate. In the immediate case of Sandy, it’s most important that we help the people whose lives, homes and livelihoods have been disrupted by the storm take care of themselves — but it’s also not unfair to point out in doing so that the group that was by far the most effective in getting such aid and comfort to the field wasn’t FEMA, wasn’t the Red Cross, wasn’t anything but other New Yorkers organized and acting on the principles of mutual aid. May it only be the first of many in our time.

PS: If you’re concerned with arranging how and where you’ll meet up with family and other loved ones in the event of an emergency, it’s never a bad time to make and share a free Safety Map. And, again, if you’re interested in volunteering at 520 Clinton (or for any other Occupy Sandy initiative), please sign up via the form here. It’d be great to see you there.