Indian Infrastructural Hardware Mash-Up
All this talk of Mumbai twittering and new media real-time mash-ups reminded me of a picture Mrs. Ubiwar recently snapped while we were in Delhi. This is an awesome example of what I’m going to call an infrastructural hardware mash-up:
I’ve seen similarly complex jury-rigging in cities from Beijing to Beira and they constitute an organic urban form in themselves. Unregulated evolution, constrained only by human ingenuity and the dedication of the scrounger, leads to these trees of wire and flex. As long as the electrosap keeps flowing, they continue to grow, canopies of cables hopping with bit-monkeys and digital insects. I can almost hear the birds singing.
When I was an analyst pictures like this came in my e-mail inbox all the time, from Iraq and other countries. When you attack a country’s infrastructure the expectation is that the infrastructure has, well, structure. The late-20th century “air war” campaigns that applied this assumption, like Desert Storm, are becoming as out dated as the “battlefield” wars of old.