the ethics and politics of information architecture

The Ethics and Politics of Information ArchitectureShaping Society through Structure and Control

Andrea @Resmini

ASIS&T Information Architecture Summit 2016

THE ETHICS AND POLITICS OF INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE

(Pacific Rim)

HUDs, holographic interfaces, plasma cannons. Movies such as Pacific Rim have it all. It’s easy to see how these promises of a magical future captivate us and why we work hard to recreate these in the digital world of today.

But the point I want to make today runs contrary to our fascination with all things glowing blue. I do believe we’ll have holograms, and VR, and UIs that respond to our brain waves, but so much of this will be tactics, and not strategy. Strategy does not have a pretty face, strategy is pipes and brickwork and infrastructures, and strategy is where information architecture belongs.


“Facebook promises not to use its product to influence the US presidential election”. Business Insider ran this story a couple of weeks ago. This is where I want to start from, and let me say it’s good of Facebook to promise they’ll behave. It’s also good of us to believe them.

Because this is the issue: not only we have no way to really verify if that statement corresponds to the truth, but it would be even difficult to assess what’s the meaning of “influencing the election”. We’re discussing a platform whose algorithmic information architecture is a black box. The rules and structures that decide how to order posts from sources we “liked”, that promote or demote, show or hide events, they are unknown to us. Facebook is not a neutral platform: it’s a tool through which a company is furthering its business goals.


Of course, Facebook the company is not the problem here. Or, if you prefer, this is not a problem we solve shutting down Facebook. Or Buzzfeed. Or Blindspot.


(Image: Arne Kullmann, https://www.flickr.com/photos/arne/5835855777)

The point I’ll be trying to make today is pretty simple: the world is a much larger place than we thought twenty years ago, and the distinction between physical and digital, offline and online, is becoming fuzzier and fuzzier. Eventually, it will go away.

This is changing the way we think of digital itself, and its relationship with the world. It’s making it much more strategic, and dangerous.

When this community went mainstream in the 90s, library and information science, the core body of knowledge and expertise that Lou and Peter and others brought in, seemed to be all that was necessary. Information architecture was mostly seen as some sort of library science for the Web, largely tackling problems of labeling, categorization, and ordering.

These are still there, they are,


Biancoshock (https://www.facebook.com/fra.biancoshock/)

… but the illusion of the Web as a library and the Internet as a different and separated world have given way to much more complex scenarios.



The world of today is postdigital. Digital is not disruptive anymore, it blends easily with physical. The Internet is a piece of a larger mechanism where our activities, our consumption and coproduction of information happens across multiple contexts through multiple devices and unstable, emergent choreographies.

We moved from punchin cards and lab coats to sensors and actuators, from authorship to multiple anonymous collaboration, from the screen to the world. Focus is now moving away from the single artifact, the website or the app, to consider the entire experience ecosystem as a complex, crosschannel informationbased beast.



As a result, information architecture itself is a different thing: a channel or mediumaspecific multidisciplinary framing.

Now, does this mean that whatever you learned or whatever you do is suddenly worthless? No, that actually is the one single blind spot this community has, if you allow me to generalize.

Carpenters make wooden chairs, and one can very well specialize in making gorgeous and very comfortable wooden chairs. This is not only normal, and healthy, but it’s necessary. It provides continuity, a sense of history. But claiming that all of carpentry is chairmaking and set in stone, that would be a bit ridicolous, right? The challenges we face are different, as are the opportunities.


shallowness

Unfortunately, we are so entrenched with this fast layer we contribute creating, with the blue glow, with disruption, with what comes next, that the forest has become the trees. Our first capital sin is shallowness. We are blind because we have short memory. Let me elaborate.


Technology is a tool we use to make the world what we want it to be. To give it order. We do this through our control of space, and time.

We see the disruptive power of the Internet, shrinking distances, making everything instantaneous, tearing down borders, and we think this is all new.

Oxford professor Luciano Floridi maintains that ICT, information and communication technology, has been with us since we invented writing, and that ICT among other things immediately made time so irrelevant that we can still read and enjoy Plato or Shakespeare today. This book, “The Victorian Internet”, recounts the story of how roughly 150 years ago the telegraph was the very first technology that did that to space. Made it irrelevant.


(Image: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3mbSeqxEx8)

Information was suddenly not bound by horse, ship, or train. Before the telegraph any North American business that dealt with the import of bananas from South America performed a four step choreography: ask the captain and crew of this year’s ship how the next harvest looked like down there when they departed, make a business prediction and bet their company on it being accurate, wait one year, see if next year’s ship brought in to port what they expected. Surprises of course were not uncommon. The telegraph changed all of this almost overnight.

And after the telegraph, we’ve been basically perfecting how to move and share information around at an increasingly massive scale.


(Image: nielsonschool.blogspot.se)

Way before becoming a monopoly on both sides of the Atlantic, the telegraph was also an open platform brought together through an API, we would say, a communication protocol. Telegraph operators were de facto the first “online” community. It was not uncommon for them to spend their offtime chatting together in large “rooms”, which sometime counted up to the hundreds. They shared a special jargon, and made little of borders. Basically, as soon as we had a way to spend more time gossiping with strangers, we took it.


(Image: Tillman County Chronicles, tillmancountychronicles.blogspot.se)

When the telephone came along, the pattern repeated itself, with even more emphasis on openness. The cost of entry is the primary indicator of how much an industry can be said to be “open”, and the phone system initially had very low entry barriers. Here in the US, while Bell was fighting telegraph behemoth Western Union, local companies multiplied, eventually reaching 3 million phones on their network. Bell had 2.5 millions. Individuals took it up for themselves where local companies didn’t want to go. After all, a line of galvanized wire was all that was needed.

We’ve seen this all over again at the time AOL was around. Local providers, local businesses”.

Bell responded to this initially by becoming a closed garden and refusing to interconnect, and we’ve seen this recently as well.

In the end, the Bell company declared open war on these Independents, and managed to definitely crush their competition on its second try, when they abandoned their earlier scorched earth approach for a much more rewarding “join us, it’s going to be great” line that managed to break the ranks of those who resisted assimilation. The dark side has never looked any better since.


(Image: The Brox Sisters, Wikipedia)

The wireless, the radio, came next. The radio is probably the most interesting example, because not only its very openness was part of its success, everybody could buy or make one and start broadcasting and DIY radio magazines were all the rage, but long after it was a thing, its business model was not clear at all and the medium was basically up for grabs.

We had to wait well into the ‘30s for Procter & Gamble to figure out that popular radio shows offered them an audience, decide to run a few commercials, and give birth to the very concept of the soap opera.

Meanwhile, radio stations, many of which we’d consider little more than amateur “blogs” today, moved from 5 in 1921 to more than 500 in 1923. More than 2 million broadcastcapable radios had been sold by 1924. Before the Internet, the radio was without doubt the greatest open medium of the 20th century.


Tim Wu

I guess you can see the pattern now. This is what Tim Wu, calls the Cycle, capital C, in his book, “The Master Switch”.

The excitement of reaching strangers, the feeling of connection, the wonder, the opening up, the coming down of barriers was there in the 1860s for the telegraph, in the 1910s for the radio, and in the 1990s for the Internet. There is emphasis on kinship and goodwill, and very few expectations “to cash in”.


“all technology starts out openand gradually becomes closed”

This is the Cycle. All technology starts out open and gradually becomes closed. A few visionaries declare this technology to be the ultimate tool that will lead to world peace, the masses rejoice, then barriers, legal and financial, are introduced, and the playground becomes the private property of a few.


Nicholas Negroponte

I guess you could say that it was just logical then that in 1997, speaking at a tech conference in Brussel, Nicholas Negroponte of the MIT Media Lab proclaimed that “the Internet will do no less than bring world peace by bringing down national borders”. It was not the first time we were saying that.


“the Internet will do no less thanbring world peace by breaking down

national borders”

Now, hear me well: this might actually be that one time when we pull it off, but we, the makers, educators, the researchers, cannot be naïve souls who cannot see the bigger picture. We shouldn’t be drinking our own koolaid (snake oil).

Any uplifting example of how the Internet has made us more free can be countered with a contrary case. Massive allencompassing structures of order and control are in place: we now have in place the ultimate, allinone tool for tracking us all 24/7.


“eternal vigilance is the price of liberty:power is ever stealing

from the many to the few”

If “eternal vigilance is the price of liberty”, are we being vigilant?


George Orwell

Problem is, it seems we’ve been so worried about George Orwell’s “1984” and Big Brother, we shallowly thought the battle we had to fight implied coercion. A bureaucratic, oppressive regime which sees all. I can’t shake the impression we’ve been mislaid and that Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” is where we ended up.


Aldous Huxley

Huxley presents us a view of the future where all of mankind is enslaved through pleasure. In the brave new world we are slaves because we want to be. We love our selfies, our memes, our narcissism. Oh wait, he didn’t mention selfies. He actually mentioned ageism, the prominence of commerce as a value, constant psychological manipulation, and an abundance of material goods. The World State is a benevolent dictatorship that wants everyone happy. You get the point.


“1984” was published in 1949, “Brave New World” in 1931, right after Huxley visited America (he.), but these optimistic and pessimistic visions of how technology will change humanity and society have been with us since forever. Plato’s considered writing a deleterious tekne. Young Greeks would hear many things and will learn nothing. Gutenberg’s press was suspected to be a ‘confusing and harmful’ device, overwhelming people with information.

If these visions of bliss and despair have been with us forever, shouldn’t we just be happy apping away? Working on our neat little taxonomies? Be done with it?


(A. Bartholl , Museum of Moving Image)

Well, no. The problem lies with the increasing reach of information architecture specifically and of user experience in general as we progressively digitize the world.

Filing your tax return twenty years ago would have probably involved paper forms, an accountant, a visit to the tax office, a visit to the bank, plenty of physical bits. The same you could say for education, or healthcare. I filed my tax return before getting on the plane to Atlanta, and all I did was login to two different websites, authenticate myself using an app, check a spreadsheet, and click “submit”. My receipts are an email and a text message.

Experiences become crosschannel experiences in blended spaces, and information architecture is the invisible structure that holds them together.


This is not just about ecommerce or personal gratification. For better or worse, we make or unmake people’s lives. We cannot afford ourselves to be shallow.


Luciano Floridi

Forty years ago, in 1976, Richard Saul Wurman saw this information tsunami coming. More recently, Floridi has called this tsunami the fourth revolution, the Turing revolution, the one making us realize that we are connected agents, informational organisms, sharing a global environment made of information.

As much as the playfield of the industrial revolution was physical space, and the city, architecture and city planning, our playfield is the digital / physical infospace. This is the one revolution bringing along a need for designing information as the primary material of our age. That sounds like something information architecture could do to me.

But are we being vigilant?


self-awareness

It is time we take a long, deep breath, and slow down. Because our second sin is selfawareness, or rather the lack of. Look back, tie our tradition into those those of design and architecture, look forward and let our gaze go yonder without fear of being shallow.


(Urartu cuneiform, Wikipedia)

As I said, Floridi calls the technological layer we work with ICT, information and communication technology, and he says that we’ve been having ICT since we started writing. ICT allowed the externalization and the preservation of thought, and as such, the accumulation of knowledge. It is not a long stretch to see how the printing press, the telegraph, the telephone, the radio, and the Internet are, if you allow me again, the simple perfecting of this base ICT.


Information is all over the place. It’s not confined to screens, nor to pointtopoint interactions with individual devices.

The world that we live in is a postdigital world, where an app is an avatar for a distributed taxi service, information is becoming embodied, and our responsibilities grow by the day.

The cultural paradigm has moved on from postmodernism to digimodernism.

From irony, detachment, and pastiche, to the raw, visceral, and unfinished. Our digimodern artifacts are constantly changing, volatile, cocreated. Digimodern completely removes the idea of the individual author from the picture: Facebook is an ever unfinished constant stream of multitudes.

This shift also implies that value, individual value, organizational value, social value, is increasingly being created systemically, elsewhere, in different ways.

But what do we mean by value? That’s the one tricky question, one that cannot be escaped.

All design, and therefore all of information architecture, involves value choices. These in turn imply there’s an ethical dimension to what we do.


we are good at microbut pretty bad at macro

I posit here that as a community, and in the exercise of our competencies, we are good at micro ethical and political decisions, but rather bad at macro. We care for a gendered form, we somehow fail to move that attention from being tactical to being strategic.

We seem stuck between plain business sense and sudden bouts of idealism, and that is because somehow we do not really have a way to assess if and how that strategic attention would make the world a better place and still pay the bills.

If we look at the way business ethics is generally framed, I’d argue that much of what we do oscillates between unapologetic stockholder theory and unbound social contract theory. Let me explain using a baseball example because this is boring stuff.


Stockholder theory postulates that a company only works towards the goals set out by those who invest money in it. As long as it’s legal, we’re fine. Things involve a few actors only, by the home plate.


Stakeholder theory maintains that a company should consider the extended network of people who have a stake in the company, from employees to suppliers to the local community. The outfielders are in. This is what usercentered design is mostly about.


Social contract theory reverses all this: society allows a company to exist as long as it provides more value than it costs. This involves everyone, including those on the bleachers and beyond. As broad as they are, these theories offer managers a moral compass, the “Don’t do evil” thing.


Peter Morville wrote one of his “Strange connections” pieces in 2000 on the Ethics of Information Architecture. You can always count on Peter to look a bit further down the road.


More recently, in 2015, Cennydd Bowles wrote “The ethics of digital design” for the UK Design Council. Mimi Launder wrote an interesting piece called “The ethics of UX: when is it good design and when are you just tricking people?” for Digital Arts in early 2016. You probably know of more examples, some good, some less than good. We do discuss ethics, sure.

Regardless, much of our discussion of ethics seem to be centered around a defensive and very narrow view of “don’t play foul with your customers”, be a good boyscout. That is definitely a good thing, but it is not the conversation we need to have. This is not progressing. This does not give us leverage for a discussion with the business side, nor gives a way to engage with society. This is not acknowledging the change in scope that our practice has been going through. Our third sin is naïve agency.


naïve agency

Naive agency is one of number of “questionable, naive approaches to ethical reasoning” that a study on the “Consequences of Computing” carried out in the 90s.

Naive agency means that all moral authority is surrendered to someone else, such as a boss, for whom we are but agents. It doesn’t matter if enthusiastic supporters or reluctant victims, we just surrender our agency. This probably rings familiar to anyone in this room.

It is a bleak, joyless view of our field and profession, and one that terribly clashes with the tradition of design and architecture as they have been defined in the past two hundred years. As an aside, it also clashes with the individual responsibility that is enshrined in democratic legal systems.

Ready? I have to take you to a few bad places


Jamie Bartlett

This part relies a lot on Jamie Bartlett’s “The Dark Net”, a great book you should read, on Trottier’s “Social Media as Surveillance”, and on a couple of months of leisurely investigations on my part. And believe me when I say that this has been one hell of a painful experience with very practical drawbacks. It’s not a trip to Disneyland.

You also want to Tor your way into this, if you plan exploring, unless you want your ads to give you nightmares for months to come. Even the idea of a SWAT team invading your home at 3am to take you away because of your browser history is nothing compared to the concerned looks family members share after inadvertently peeking at your screen when the ads algorithms kick in for good.

These examples describe blended information spaces: they are postdigital, connecting activities in real life and in physical places with infospace trivially, effortlessly; they are all embodied experiences that transcend the idea of the screen as a separate world; they all are digimodern in nature, actordriven, volatile, supposedly representing “life as it is”.

Information architecture plays a strategic role here.

They illustrate our three problems: shallowness, lack of selfawareness, and naïve agency.

They are all also prone to make some of you, and me for sure, uncomfortable at times. That’s why I chose them. Let’s start with camming.


Camming is performing in front of a webcam for money or, as professor Feona Attwood told Bartlett, a “better kind of porn: somehow more real, raw and innovative than the products of the mainstream porn industry.”

Camming plays into everything digimodern and the sociotechnical changes of the information revolution. Cammers are overwhelmingly young women in their twenties. Specialized websites host their shows and provide the technological platform allowing them to offer what is a tightly choreographed experience supported by the simultaneous stream of live video and live chat and sustained by a crosschannel array of ancillary platforms, from Instagram to Snapchat, with live audiences that number anywhere between a few individuals to the thousands. Performers grow a fan base, with the most affectionate members becoming familiar figures they recognize and call by handle.

Even if predicated on the “girl next door” fiction and played out mostly by nonprofessionals, or by any extent by people extraneous to the regular mainstream porn world, with regulars who appreciate the rough edges, the silliness, and sometimes the inadequacies as much as anything else, these are nonetheless business transactions.

One of the most widely used cam platforms is set up so that the performer can easily handle large crowds by splitting them up in freeriders, those who have no tokens, no money to spend, and that are greyed out in the chat window, and those who are ready to give. Performers can “turn the greys off”.


A rather sophisticated information architecture is in place: viewers who have money to spend but who have not tipped more than a given amount of tokens in a given amount of time are listed in light blue. Viewers who spend liberally and regularly are listed in dark blue. As Bartlett calls it, this is a “boardspecific class system”. We’d call it a classification system, in which dark blues are more likely to receive the gratification of an immediate reply from the performer when they say something in the chat box.

On top of everything, the main platforms all throw in plenty of systemwide leaderboards. This produces interesting effects on the tipping, which very often peaks or ebbs unrelated to what’s happening on the screen. Performers add top tipper’s prizes, maintain a top ten on their homepages, and the list of “most valued tippers” appears in the chat box during a show every now and then. Regulars constantly try to outtip each other to gain a performer’s favors. This is the Internet equivalent of your raunchy reality show, and not that much different from whatever the Kardashians of the world do with their Instagrams. In a typical 2 hour show, Bartlett recognized that no more than 5 minutes contain actual, explicit sexual behavior. As he puts it, “things go wrong, there are mistakes, there’s chat, cats wander in and out”.

Is all of this ethical? What is the role of design in here? Preventing exploitation? That of the performers, who are clearly objectified to a degree, or that of the viewers, who are clearly pushed to spending more and more money? What are the questions that information architecture should try to answer? What rock do we want to stand on?


The answer cannot be “this is bad”, we shouldn’t take part. Someone has to designs even the worst of experiences. What is worse for a prison and for its inmates, an ethical architect who has a political stance to make or a clueless drone who’s just happy with the paycheck?

You draw your own conclusions, but I wonder: is naïve agency, shallowness, lack of selfawareness taking us anywhere good?

Okay, deep breath.


“Sorry you’re here” is a phrase made (in)famous by more than one “pro” selfharm site since Andrew Beals created alt.suicide.holiday, or “a.s.h”, on the Usenet in 1991.

In the late 90s, proana (for anorexia) and promia (for bulimia) websites started to make their appearance on the Internet. While different, they tended to present these not as illnesses or symptoms of some distress, but rather as lifestyle choices.

Proana websites very often link to procutting websites, especially popular with teenage girls.

Within these subcultures, the tricks and tips shared between members are by and large the most harmful and destructive elements. “Extremely destructive and unhealthy ideas and behaviours” are offered as wellmeaning support through direct social interactions and personal feedback.


(Image: http://img00.deviantart.net/a4ee/i/2012/138/0/d/self___harm__by_xmaryxedgex-d506uyp.jpg)

In such places, the more this suffering is expressed publicly, the more sympathy and attention one receives. The more the likes, the more the thread bubbles up.

Findability is a problem that can lead to serious consequences.

Very clearly, the Internet has not created any of these behaviors, but it is changing how they are expressed, experienced, and understood.

What should we do?

Infospace doesn’t have depth. It’s broad, but shallow. Everything is a google search away. If you know where to look, everything is as accessible as everything else.

Is findability secondary to, what, think of the children? Should we educate? Should we censor? Should we prosecute? Isn’t the strength of the Internet its neutrality, the fact it carries everything, shows everything, makes no distinctions?

You draw your own conclusions, but I wonder: is naïve agency taking us anywhere?

Alright, almost there. Stretch. Here comes a nice picture, but then it gets worse. Then it gets better.


It’s the little details, they matter, as my friend Alberta loves to say.

I live in Sweden. That makes me a half a viking, at least in size. One of the things Sweden seems to be infamous for is the fact that information about your taxes, your property, or your whereabouts is publicly accessible.

I can text a specific government service and in the space of a few seconds know how much our current prime minister made last year. Or text someone’s plate to another number and know everything about the car and who owns it. No questions asked. Anyone can do that. Not bad for a country where you could possibly never speak to your neighbors and still be considered ok.

In polite conversations with Americans, this openness usually elicits that “those funny Swedes” look that I’ve come to know all too well, followed by a quick change of topic. I get it. Some information is better kept private. Then I come to your US of A, and I find this:


It has a search engine, so I tried it out.


Pretty useful, hu? And what pretty graphics. Busy neighborhood, too.

Is findability a value again now? Because I feel safer? I’m not sure.

We all agree these people did bad things. But where should we draw the line?

Should we have a website for political offenders? And what about one for people who think that separate but equal is segregation? After all, that was the law, right?

Where does the principled disagreement this country knows so well get to become enshrined in a taxonomy that simply furthers othering, producing damage, as David Bloxsom told us yesterday in a workshop.

I’ll stop here. I think you get my gist.


(Image:: Mashable)

These are not new problems. Nor are they unknown to information architecture. Bowker and Star, in their fantastic “Sorting things out”, discuss how any classification is inherently political. Taxes, medicine, education, media. The more invisible they are, the more they are one with the fabric of reality, the more they are effective.

This is what I think a contemporary political stance around information architecture should reverse: when everything is black boxes keeping us happy for someone else’s advantage, we should be making informed decisions, and we can only do that if ...


make the architectures explicitmake the processes visible

make them actionable

we make the architectures explicit, make the processes visible, make them actionable. allowing consent, which is at the basis of any ethical behavior, and a degree of personal control.

But how can we do this if we are not seeing these walls ourselves?

If we are naïve agents for someone else’s wants?

The consequences of our work are producing larger and larger ripples every day. This postdigital, digimodern world is all about distributed control. People create connections and emergent structures, not us. Masses produce content, not us.


(Image:: Newsweek)

While it’s relatively easy to police a street, the consequence of our actions are visible. Our presence manifest. When physical and digital blend, those who control the architectures of information unseen ultimately control society.

Social media, this fantastic instrument for global surveillance, is also producing something new: social convergence. In the space of the city, we all learn about the bad neighborhoods, or maybe just the places that are not good for us, whatever they are. Online, no such thing. Cops and thieves, family and terrorists, girls hurting themselves and men hurting girls, they all share the same place.

What do we think of this? Do we approve? Do we turn away? Do we care?

Any profession, any field, any discipline responds to a series of moral imperatives.

As creating information architectures is a profession, I believe we have the responsibility to shape our professions and what it creates in ways that are socially responsible. We can’t leave it to others.


(Image:: Newsweek)

We understand design is a generative act. It brings into the world something that does not exist. As such, it’s not neutral. Not only it expresses individual, organizational, and social power relations, but it changes the very landscape it becomes part of.

If it’s true that every person ultimately wants to leave the world a better place for having lived, isn’t it about time that we look beyond the limited horizons of the genderrespectful forms, as important as they are, and start taking in the responsibilities we have in shaping our society? Is structure and control and a general sense of joyful exploitation what we want to leave behind as our legacy? Do we really want to be remembered as the ones who could do something and didn’t?

Making the architecture visible and reintroducing an ethic based on consent in our work means creating structures that thrive on disclosure, openness, clarity, and understanding. We can’t work from shallowness, lack of selfawareness, and naïve agency.

Is this even possible? I think it is.


Hotel Yeoville is a neighborhood in Johannesburg, South Africa. 65% of the inhabitants are African immigrants, “isolated and excluded from mainstream South African society and their dominant engagement is with each other and with their home in far away places”.

Terry Kurgan, a South African artist and photographer, started a project to trasnform what was a space of dislocation, insecurity, uncertainty, transience, neglect, crime, contest, exploitation and the transgression of boundaries, into something different. She wanted to capture the space of romance, nostalgia and memories of another city altogether that old Yeoville residents still shared.


The project investigated, recorded and made visible the experience of the people who are living there, and brought their reflections to policymakers, city planners and designers. It explored the internet cafés of the area, over 20 cafe’s in a 57 block radius, the concepts of communal computing, longdistance communication, and shared spaces of use. It represented, exhcnaged, supported, and resulted in an exhibition, a book, and a community website.

Jason Hobbs, who was the information architect in residence, spoke about how the project was the catalyst for a more humane, meaningful and socially engaged approach to information architecture at the IA Summit 2008 in Miami.


Now, some ten years later, Jason Hobbs and Terence Fenn’s firm has tranformed that initial seed in a model they use to approach problems systemically, ethically, and politically. Their Firma model is currently being used to tackle information architecture problems number in a number of projects in South Africa. There’s some effort involved, but it can be done.


(Image: Wikipedia)

A final thought. If you have been to Paris, you might have visited Place des Vosges. It’s an incredible, literal square in the Marais district, built in the 17th century on what was originally one of the royal residences.


(Imae: placesinparis.com)

In place of private property of the king and queen, the people of Paris received a public place. In infospace, this process is reversing itself. Maybe Wu is right, that’s the Cycle at work. What was public becomes private.


But we shouldn’t make the mistake to treat a private corporation’s own playground as it were public soil. This is a mistake that 20th century architects did not do with their materials: a clear view of the ethical and political priorities of the time led to a massive reconceptualization of mass housing and an idea of the city as a system structured through architecture. This is our mould: what they did with space, we will have to do with information.

In 30 years, Facebook or what will be there in its place will possess an amount of information that is unprecedented in the history of mankind. In 40 years, it will be the largest cemetery ever known to any culture so far.

Maybe we should reclaim public soil in infospace, maybe we should start a revolution, maybe we should simply be thoughtful, selfaware, engaged. Whatever the answer to this might be, we are needed.

We have a role to play here and it’s about time we become the architects we say we are. After all, we all want to leave the world a better place, isn’t that so?


Thank you

I’d love to know what you think. Ping me @resmini.