Link: Urban Computing Spring 07 » Blog Archive » 06. Market.
For the last few hundred years, capital has been a universal solvent slowly working away at cultural activity, transforming family relations, sexual relations, even the I-Thou relation at the heart of monotheism into commercial propositions. Functions that had originally properly belonged to the members of the family, to ritual, to the polity, have successively been displaced outside those structures and reorganized on transactional lines.
Well and good, perhaps, and in and of itself evidently not enough to inflect the structure of our cities in unfamiliar ways. But for the past decade or so, another universal solvent has been etching its way into the structures our cultures are built on: the binary code of ones and zeros....
