Information Landscapes and the Feral City

This subject has been on the back burner for about two years, but I’ve yet to do much with it. Meanwhile, the world continues to turn, and others work on it. I want to develop the ideas somehow, but for now some preliminary thoughts.

The feral city

In 2003, Richard J. Norton of the U.S. Naval War College wrote a paper in the Naval War College Review titled ‘Feral Cities: The New Strategic Environment‘. This often overlooked article was described earlier this year by Anthony Townsend, Research Director at the Institute for the Future, as “[o]ne of the most influential pieces of contemporary urban theory I’ve ever read”.

Norton described the scenario:

Imagine a great metropolis covering hundreds of square miles. Once a vital component in a national economy, this sprawling urban environment is now a vast collection of blighted buildings, an immense petri dish of both ancient and new diseases, a territory where the rule of law has long been replaced by near anarchy in which the only security available is that which is attained through brute power. Such cities have been routinely imagined in apocalyptic movies and in certain science-fiction genres, where they are often portrayed as gigantic versions of T.S. Eliot’s Rat’s Alley. Yet this city would still be globally connected. It would possess at least a modicum of commercial linkages, and some of its inhabitants would have access to the world’s most modern communication and computing technologies. It would, in effect, be a feral city.

“I think we are in rats’ alley / Where dead men lost their bones”, wrote Eliot in his barely intelligible 1922 classic, The Wasteland. More recently, Warren Ellis’ Feral City is a ‘collapsing urban trashzone’, where state security consists of three-and-a-half policemen trying to keep order in a chaotic and just plain weird cityscape. Germane to Norton’s thesis, one of its characters is a suicide bomber, the feral city exerting, in Norton’s words, “an almost magnetic influence on terrorist organizations.” We know that Ellis read Norton’s essay before he wrote the book, as almost certainly has John Robb, although I can’t recall Robb citing it anywhere (although his readers have).

Hisaharu Motoda, Ameyoko [link]

Telepathic sociopathy

The paper’s influence on Anthony Townsend is evident from his words at the top of this post, although Townsend was too modest on that occasion to mention his own work on the subject. In 2007 he presented a paper in Budapest at the Towards a Philosophy of Telecommunications Convergence conference which, apart from being a real mouthful to say, looks like just the sort of event your correspondent would love to have been at. The paper ‘Thinking in Telepathic Cities’ was later developed as a full article [PDF]for the conference proceedings and deserves more traction than it’s got thus far. Perhaps it was the mention of telepathy that turned some people off, but it’s important to realise what Townsend means when he uses that contentious word.

Yet today, the interest in telepathy is not in verifying its existence, or understanding its physiological or supernatural mechanisms, but rather in replicating its functionality through engineering.

… by employing this term, I seek to emphasize the nature of mobile communications as an extension of the self, rather than exclusively a media for social communication.

Telepathy, for Townsend, is not a psychic phenomenon beloved of cranks and snake-oil salesmen, but a form of telepresence enabled by technology. Behind global mass urbanisation evident is “a larger meta-narrative of extreme mobility”, stabilised to a certain degree by new forms of social interaction mediated by mobile technologies:

Alongside this shift towards a more information-based, ephemeral physical city, the emergence of telepathic infrastructures is rapidly codifying, embodying and annotating what was once the most ephemeral aspect of urban living – social networks. And thus we’re seeing intense internal conflict as telepathic individuals augmented by these new technologies struggle to understand their identity within a world where every social action and relationship is recorded and visible. As internet “philosopher” Jarod Lanier pointed out, the irony is that we are inventing what looks like a new kind of “digital Maoism”.

Gone is the serendipitous exploration of our physical urban environment. Instead we reach for our mobile devices to connect to disembodied social networks, selectively disconnecting ourselves from the warp and weft of the streets and spaces of the built city.

I mention the original conference paper because it references Norton’s work, mysteriously dropped from the publication galleys. It occurs in the final, cautionary and speculative section on telepathic sociopaths, developed further in the published article:

The idea that telepathic communications could empower sociopaths to become more socially networked, and therefore more powerful and disruptive, seems ironic. But the notion that these capabilities could be used to coordinate individuals acting in their own self-interest is well documented, and in fact underlies much of the thinking about digital commons today.

This is true. The nexus between technology, psychology and the commission of criminal acts is of deep concern to counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency theorists and practitioners, as well as traditional law enforcement and technical agencies. The suppressed 2005 RAND report on Future Insurgency Threats addressed the ‘federated insurgency complexes’ partly facilitated by mobile communications technology. The very idea of super-empowered individuals (SEIs) is predicated on their access to communications networks and leverage of complex systems.

Information landscapes & the urban future

As William Gibson has said many times, “The future is already here. It’s just not very evenly distributed.” Various commentators have homed in on Mogadishu as the only current example of a feral city, with good reason. There is no reason necessarily to suggest that once a city becomes feral – Rio de Janeiro, Baghdad, Paris – it remains so, but the drift towards incoherent and incomprehensible cities is apparent, whether in conflict zones or not.

Mogadishu and Baghdad have both seen huge mobile telephony uptake. John Robb quotes figures from Baghdad that suggest a ten-fold increase in phone subscribers between the pre-war period and 2006 (and a 44-times increase in internet subscribers over the same period). Mobile phone users have topped three billion worldwide, 1.3bn of whom have internet access on their handheld devices.

Whole books will continue to be written about the uptake and implications of communications technology. I wonder though about the specific implications of the breakdown of urban order and infrastructure as predicted by Richard Norton, and theorised by Robb and others, and the telepathic phenomena hypothesised by Anthony Townsend. What will the relationship between information and architecture (not) look like? Does urban disorder lead to disembodied communication, or does the fracturing of social networks progress the disintegration of the city? Nothing as causal or empirical, I’m sure, but there may be a symbiosis in the process of human-city-machine socialisation. Complex, but ultimately navigable, terrain.