Idées Fortes
(Re)placing the City of Bricks
Digital technology- the Internet in particular- is often accused of contributing to the deterioration of place. It has been construed as the antithesis of the carbon-based world our grandparents paved, knitted, and nailed together with sex and sweaty palms. The networked computer, meanwhile, creates an alluring "mirror world" with many of the features and few of the dangers of downtown. This online metropolis, it is feared, this city of bits, will render the city of bricks obsolete.
Cyberspace is, of course, an ethereal realm, one floating above the millennia-old tangles of geography and place. This is hardly surprising, given that the Internet began as the ultimate antispatial exercise, conceived to be everywhere and nowhere at once. This placelessness has encouraged some dire predictions about the fate of the city. From a purely practical standpoint, we don't really need the city anymore- many of the chores of daily urban life can be handled from a stream bank in Vermont. Digital technology appears to challenge the raison d'étre of urbanism.
This has particular appeal in the United States, historically an anti-urban nation, and one that has long sought respite in a"middle landscape" equidistant from both the city and the wilderness. What the streetcar and the automobile initially delivered- a suburban life in a manicured pastoral setting- the modem and motherboard have made productive. Now, in theory at least, the middle landscape is no longer an inert bedroom refuge, a place to retire at dusk; it can be the setting for a life both close to nature yet fully engaged with the world of affairs and ideas that for centuries only the city could provide. Our digital"instruments of instant artificial adjacency," as Michael Sorkin has called them, give fresh meaning to Leo Marx's classic dialectic of the"machine in the garden."
Savvy marketers have been quick to capitalize on this quest for a mythic pastoral. A Packard Bell ad campaign, for example, begins in an urban apocalypse worthy of Fritz Lang, the modern metropolis as unrepentant hell. Aging patrons shuffle in resignation through a gloomy banking hall; Nazi-like guards patrol the public library; a child hides behind an ancient edition of Paradise Lost. Suddenly, the camera sweeps skyward past skull-studded parapets and off to a fresh green landscape. The clouds break, and the sun shines brightly on a single-family home surrounded by rolling hills and a picket fence. The voice-over chirps:"Wouldn't you rather be at home?"
Taken to an extreme, the combination of digital technology and fear of the urban environment can lead to the creation of a fractious, bifurcated society. When all the knowledge workers telecommute, who is left to tend the city? Those with the education and means to flee urban"evils" will do so, while the others will be forced to remain. Poverty of information will further alienate the marginalized, while the cognitive élite build themselves a virtual metropolis, a world perhaps like the apartheid burbclaves in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash.
This radical view, however, is highly unlikely. Most evidence suggests that the city has prospered in the digital age - from the proliferation of districts such as Silicon Alley and Multimedia Gulch, to the popularity of webcams and sites like CitySearch, to the robust economy, due in large measure to the infotech industry. Rather than wash away its purpose and vitality, the bitstream has given new life to the city of bricks.
In the future, cities will likely play even more strategic roles. Metropolitan centers like New York, Hong Kong, and Tokyo are the pulse points of the global information economy; any increase in volume and intensity will add immeasurably to their power and influence. Admittedly, there are costs associated with maintaining a physical presence in the city; many institutions will find it increasingly difficult to justify the expense when the products and services they offer are digital. But the"economy of presence," as Bill Mitchell and Oliver Strimpel described it, works both ways; there are real, tangible values to being there. The placeness of the city can never be replicated.
Don't Blame the Tools
There is a middle ground in the discussion of filters that goes largely unnoticed in the sloganeering and handwaving about "privatized censorship," on the one side, and "user empowerment," on the other. Increasingly, we will all be using filtering systems simply to manage the load of information we face. And these technologies will be used by some governments to censor. Consider: personal computers make it easier for governments to engage in oppression, too. But we never oppose PCs for this reason. Human beings, not their tools, bear responsibility for censorship.
This is not a defense of filters. It is instead a plea that we cease making enemies of our natural allies. Our divisiveness is something the censors use against us. Hate the censors, not the technologies.
Remote Control
Deregulation has delivered a vast array of telecommunications products to American consumers, and with long distance giants scrambling for a piece of the local action, the telcos promise that phone service will only get better- and cheaper. Is this a great time, or what? :-)
Certainly for MCI, which exploited bargain-priced customized calling circles to carve out its share of the cutthroat telecom market. Indeed, competition has been the basis of the company's success. Which is why MCI threw the book at David T. Moore when he tried to switch long distance carriers.
Moore, as it happens, was already behind bars. Rather than pay the US$3 charge routinely added to inmates' collect calls, he allegedly hacked the prison's automated call-routing service. Contacting an outside operator through other customers' voicemail systems, Moore managed to elude MCI's Maximum Security technology to reach out and touch his loved ones in northern Virginia. Though the accused was not convicted in November for his unauthorized Friends & Family discount, the case calls attention to the teleconomy inside America's prisons. The ultimate captive market, correctional institutions have become collectional systems, since inmate callers pay both their debt to society and a surcharge to companies like MCI, which reportedly controls 50 percent of the state prison market nationwide.
What was once called a bastard business has become a billion-dollar industry thanks to the convergence of two trends: telecom competition and the prison population boom. Restrictive telephone privileges, conceived to curb crime and harassing calls as well as to manage inmate behavior, have spurred the telcos to come up with intelligent service platforms like Maximum Security or BellSouth's Meridian MAX. They have also provoked a bare-knuckles battle for the exclusive prison pay phone contracts that produce revenues five times higher than the average booth on the outside. Niche providers, meanwhile, have also caught high tech fever, moving beyond the manufacture of products like ICC's indestructible pay phone to biometric systems such as T-Netix's SpeakEZ VoicePrint.
The jailers, for their part, have made out like bandits. Along with substantial signing bonuses- in California, for example, MCI and GTI installed all the necessary equipment in 32 state prisons for free- correctional facilities receive large commissions when they seal the deal. Florida, already raking in $10 million from its pact with MCI, in early 1997 also hired Sprint to handle the phones in 53 prisons, collecting a 57.5 percent commission on each call.
Though these new technologies have created major profits for the telcos, part of the price tag, of course, has been passed along to consumers - diffused for the general population, in concentrated form for the incarcerated. In fact, prison-originated phone calls cost far more than other calls: prisoners are required to call collect, then the telcos tack on surcharges, lengthen calls with recorded interruptions stating that the call comes from a correctional facility, and routinely cut off calls- forcing inmates to redial and pay an additional surcharge. Groups like Virginia-based CURE have lobbied to remove this punitive pricing structure, but the state of Virginia has put such efforts on hold - perhaps because in 1995 its commissions rose from 28 percent to 50 percent.
Prisoners aren't the only ones paying the price. In 1996, San Antonio-based North American Intelecom promised to refund $400,000 overcharged to those who accepted inmates' collect calls. In January, MCI agreed to repay $1.5 million in such overcharges to Floridians. Clock advancement, or rounding up to the next minute, and added "plus-plus" charges disguised by clock advancement are not uncommon, says Arnold Erickson, a staff attorney at the Prison Law Office of California.
America's penitentiaries have indeed become profit pens, but the tools of the trade are no longer confined to correctional facilities. Intelligent call center services have a growing foothold in government and corporate markets, both to cut costs and protect against telecom fraud. Consumers behind bars already pay the price of being a captive audience. Those of us in office cubicles may be next.
Increasing Returns
If one eternal truth unites all prosperous civilizations, it is the rapid expansion of waistlines. Statistically speaking, we're getting fatter; our children are getting fatter still. Indeed, society after society emerging from lean times soon finds itself too big for its britches. In the future, when engineered drugs and food technology sever the last connection between lifestyle and life span, portly will be as healthy as thin.
Identical clothing will also be in. Despite the trend toward one-to-one marketing, the need to belong to the tribe is even stronger. So instead of several billion clothing styles, our collective destiny reveals indistinguishable hordes of enormous mounds of flesh covered by acres of clinging spandex. Not a pretty picture, but diet, as they say, is destiny.
Speech Recognition
Just as dedicated Net connections are increasingly common, voice-recognition technology will soon permeate the commercial market. This presents a perfect opportunity for the creation of a new kind of computer bug. Such a voice virus will replicate across the Net to find target computers. Listening to everything occurring near the host's microphone, the bug will autoconvert conversations and email home plaintext transcripts, which can then be consolidated into a searchable index. Terrified? I hear you.
