8/10/2019 Wired Issue 11.06 June 2003

1/39

The New World

30 Spaces for the 21st Century

By Rem Koolhaas (Guest Editor)

Rem Koolhaas cofounded the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) in1975. He is also the founder of AMO, an architectural think tank andconsulting firm. His projects include the Kunsthal in Rotterdam, theGuggenheim in Las Vegas, and the Prada store in New York. He has wonseveral international awards, including the Pritzker Architecture Prize in2000. Koolhaas is Professor in Practice of Architecture and Urban Designat Harvard Design School, and author of S,M,L,XL(1995) with Bruce Mauand Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan(1978). Hewas the subject of the retrospective exhibition, Rem Koolhaas and thePlace of Public Architecture, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in1995.

Our old ideas about space have exploded. The past three decades haveproduced more change in more cultures than any other time in history.Radically accelerated growth, deregulation, and globalization have redrawnour familiar maps and reset the parameters: Borders are inscribed andpermeated, control zones imposed and violated, jurisdictions declared andignored, markets pumped up and punctured. And at the same time, entirelynew spatial conditions, demanding new definitions, have emerged.

Where space was considered permanent, it now feels transitory - on its wayto becoming. The words and ideas of architecture, once the officiallanguage of space, no longer seem capable of describing this proliferation

of new conditions. But even as its utility is questioned in the real world, architectural languagesurvives, its repertoire of concepts and metaphors resurrected to create clarity and definition in new,unfamiliar domains (think chat rooms, Web sites, and firewalls).Words that die in the real are rebornin the virtual.

So, for this special issue of Wired, we at AMO have invited a cadre ofwriters, researchers, critics, and artists to report on the world as they see it.What follows are 30 spaces that fall into three rough clusters: waningspaces once celebrated, now hemorrhaging aura; contested spaces,continuously refined by the battles for their dominion; and new spaces, onlyrecently understood as space at all. Together they form the beginning of aninventory, a fragment of an image, a pixelated map of an emerging world.

Concept and editorial direction: AMO: Rem Koolhaas, Lucia Allais, andMichael Rock, with Jeffrey Inaba, Brendan McGetrick, Hans Ulrich Obrist,

and Markus Schaefer

Kenn Brown

Doug Aitken

Doug Aitken

8/10/2019 Wired Issue 11.06 June 2003

2/39

Combine and Conquer

EURO SPACE: A State of Mind

By Mark Leonard

The European Union's obsession with legislation is usually taken as a sign ofweakness - a foil to the pyrotechnic might of the US military machine. But take acloser look: The bureaucrats in Brussels have been busy creating a new politicalspace that has the power to make the 21st century the European century. The EU'sgeographical expansion to 25 countries, which will grow to include a dozen smallerones and maybe even Russia, is nothing compared with its increasing legal andmoral reach. The 80,000 pages of laws the EU has developed since the commonmarket was formed in 1957 - influencing everything from genetic labeling to humanrights - have made Europe the world's first viral political space, spreading itsauthority in three innovative ways.

First, it spreads by stealth. Although the EUlegislates up to half of its member states' laws,

most of their trade, and many policy decisions -from agriculture to economics - it's practicallyinvisible. Take Britain. There are no Europeancourts, legislative chambers, or businessregulations on display in London. Instead, justas a virus takes over a healthy cell, the EUoperates through the shell of traditional politicalstructures. The British House of Commons,British Law Courts, and British civil servants are

still there, but they have all become covert agents of the EU. This is no accident. Bycreating common standards that are implemented through national institutions,Europe can take over the world without becoming a target for hostility. While everyUS company, embassy, and military base is a terrorist target, Europe's invisibilityallows it to spread its influence without provocation. Put bluntly, even if there werepeople angry enough to want to fly planes into European buildings, there is noWorld Trade Center to target.

Second, the EU thrives on diversity. The former US Secretary of State HenryKissinger once complained that Europe doesn't have a single telephone number.When there's a crisis, Americans don't know who to turn to as the authentic voice ofopinion. This is because Europe possesses many centers of power. Even the splitsbetween new and old, and the accidental good cop/bad cop routine played byBritain and France, can be seen as a sign of the EU's strength. The ultimate failureof diplomacy leading up to the war on Iraq shows that the EU is less powerful whenit doesn't share a common vision of the world, but even so, the multi-headed nature

of the union did force the US to take its case to the UN. The best way tounderstand how Europe functions is to look at a globally networked business likeVisa. By sharing control widely, and by making it impossible for any single factionor institution to dominate, a networked business can combine its global presencewith innovation and diversity to gain the kind of edge normally reserved for smallerentities. Visa, though it represents the largest single block of consumer spendingpower in the world ($362.4 trillion annually), is a skeletal organization with just afew thousand employees. The fact that Europe does not have one leader - butrather a network of centers of power united by common policies and goals - meansthat it can expand to accommodate ever-greater numbers of countries without collapsing, and continueto provide its members with the benefits of being the largest market in the world.

Third, Europe "syndicates" its legislation and values, often by threatening others with economic

isolation. Many governments outside the continent have adopted Europe's regulations to get access toits market. Even US companies have been forced to follow European regulations in at least threespheres: M&A, GM foods, and data privacy. But this model of passive aggression has had its mostdramatic effect in the EU's backyard. Consider some of the dangers faced by both Europe and the US:

PLUS

The New World

Euro Space

Nano Space

Space Space

Relationship Space

Dump Space

Atlas Space

Voice Space

Office Space

Home Space

Bush Space

Protest Space

Boom Space

Body Space

Research Space

Tight Space

Art Space

Sex Space

Border Space

Crowd Space

Future Space

Secure Space

Color Space

Blog Space

Waning Space

Robo Space

DNA Space

Ad Space

Golf Space

Limbo Space

Public Space

AMO

http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/newworld.htmlhttp://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/newworld.htmlhttp://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/euro_spc.htmlhttp://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/euro_spc.htmlhttp://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/nano_spc.htmlhttp://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/nano_spc.htmlhttp://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/space_spc.htmlhttp://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/space_spc.htmlhttp://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/relation_spc.htmlhttp://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/relation_spc.htmlhttp://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/dump_spc.htmlhttp://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/dump_spc.htmlhttp://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/atlas_spc.htmlhttp://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/atlas_spc.htmlhttp://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/voice_spc.htmlhttp://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/voice_spc.htmlhttp://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/office_spc.htmlhttp://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/office_spc.htmlhttp://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/home_spc.htmlhttp://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/home_spc.htmlhttp://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/bush_spc.htmlhttp://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/bush_spc.htmlhttp://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/protest_spc.htmlhttp://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/protest_spc.htmlhttp://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/bust_belt.htmlhttp://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/bust_belt.htmlhttp://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/body_spc.htmlhttp://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/body_spc.htmlhttp://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/research_spc.htmlhttp://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/research_spc.htmlhttp://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/tight_spc.htmlhttp://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/tight_spc.htmlhttp://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/art_spc.htmlhttp://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/art_spc.htmlhttp://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/sex_spc.htmlhttp://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/sex_spc.htmlhttp://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/border_wars.htmlhttp://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/border_wars.htmlhttp://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/crowd_spc.htmlhttp://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/crowd_spc.htmlhttp://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/future_spc.htmlhttp://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/future_spc.htmlhttp://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/secure_spc.htmlhttp://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/secure_spc.htmlhttp://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/color_spc.htmlhttp://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/color_spc.htmlhttp://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/blog_spc.htmlhttp://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/blog_spc.htmlhttp://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/i_ny.htmlhttp://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/i_ny.htmlhttp://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/robo_spc.htmlhttp://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/robo_spc.htmlhttp://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/dna_spc.htmlhttp://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/dna_spc.htmlhttp://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/ad_spc.htmlhttp://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/ad_spc.htmlhttp://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/golf_spc.htmlhttp://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/golf_spc.htmlhttp://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/limbo_spc.htmlhttp://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/limbo_spc.htmlhttp://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/public_spc.htmlhttp://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/public_spc.htmlhttp://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/public_spc.htmlhttp://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/limbo_spc.htmlhttp://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/golf_spc.htmlhttp://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/ad_spc.htmlhttp://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/dna_spc.htmlhttp://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/robo_spc.htmlhttp://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/i_ny.htmlhttp://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/blog_spc.htmlhttp://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/color_spc.htmlhttp://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/secure_spc.htmlhttp://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/future_spc.htmlhttp://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/crowd_spc.htmlhttp://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/border_wars.htmlhttp://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/sex_spc.htmlhttp://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/art_spc.htmlhttp://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/tight_spc.htmlhttp://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/research_spc.htmlhttp://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/body_spc.htmlhttp://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/bust_belt.htmlhttp://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/protest_spc.htmlhttp://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/bush_spc.htmlhttp://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/home_spc.htmlhttp://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/office_spc.htmlhttp://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/voice_spc.htmlhttp://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/atlas_spc.htmlhttp://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/dump_spc.htmlhttp://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/relation_spc.htmlhttp://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/space_spc.htmlhttp://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/nano_spc.htmlhttp://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/euro_spc.htmlhttp://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/newworld.html

8/10/2019 Wired Issue 11.06 June 2003

3/39

drug trafficking, large flows of migrants across hard-to-police borders, transnational criminal networks.Europe encourages political and economic reform by holding out the possibility of integration into theEU, and this strategy has had more success than the swift military interventions of the MonroeDoctrine. While the EU is deeply involved in Serbia's reconstruction and supports its desire to be"rehabilitated" as a European state, the US offers Colombia no such hope of integration throughmultilateral institutions or structural funds, only the temporary "assistance" of American military training

missions and aid, and the raw freedom of the US market.

This new type of power means that Europe effects change from the inside out. By contrast, when theUS engages other countries, it does so through the prism of geopolitics. Talks with Russia focus onnuclear weapons, NATO expansion, and civilian control of the military. Talks with Colombia look at theflow of drugs across its borders. Europeans start from the other end of the spectrum: What valuesunderpin the state? What are its constitutional and regulatory frameworks? Turkey renounced thedeath penalty to further its chance of admission into the EU; Britain rescinded its ban on gays in themilitary; and Italy reformed its profligate economic ways to meet EU standards. Europe's obsessionwith legal frameworks means that it can completely transform the countries it comes into contact with,instead of just skimming the surface. The US might have changed the regime in Afghanistan, butEurope is changing all of Polish society, from its economic policies and property laws to its treatmentof minorities and what gets served on the nation's tables.

The overblown rhetoric directed at the "American Empire" misses the fact that the US reach is shallowand narrow. The lonely superpower can bribe, bully, or impose its will almost anywhere in the world -but when its back is turned, its potency wanes. The strength of the EU, conversely, is broad and deep:Once sucked into its sphere of influence, countries are changed forever. Europe is a state of mind thatcannot be contained by traditional boundaries.

Mark Leonard (mark@fpc.org.uk) is director of the Foreign Policy Centre and author of NetworkEurope.

Microcosmos

NANO SPACE: The New Space Race is the Battle For More and More Control Over Less andLess.

By Larry Smarr

I have seen the future, and it is small. Steady advances in miniaturization are leading technologists

beyond the scale where Newton's laws govern the world and into the realm I term the nano arena.Within the unimaginably tiny space of 100 by 100 nanometers - one millionth the area of the period atthe end of this sentence - we're about to witness an amazing collision of physics, biology, andinformation technology. Developments in nano space will define this century just as electronics definedthe last.

8/10/2019 Wired Issue 11.06 June 2003

4/39

Outside the arena, electrons behave like billiard balls.Squeeze them into narrower confines, though, andthey behave like waves rather than particles, andcounterintuitive quantum phenomena like tunneling,spin, and entanglement take effect. In conventionaldevices such as microprocessors, this is a problem;

electrons won't stay on their copper paths,spontaneously disappearing and reappearingelsewhere. But some engineers now realize that ifthey design with quantum effects in mind, they canbuild incredibly small electronic devices. And ifscientists can manipulate individual light quantawithin the arena - a field known as nanophotonics -these devices can communicate.

Consider IBM's quantum corral, an ellipticalarrangement of iron atoms on a copper base 14 nm across. The corral, invented in 1993, couldconceivably store information by holding atoms that signify 1s and 0s.

IBM's minuscule invention is only a little smaller than a more common information-bearingnanostructure: rhinovirus, the cause of the common cold. Rhinovirus' 20-sided shell of interlockingproteins protects an RNA strand of roughly 7,000 nucleotides. That is, this replicating nanomachineessentially carries 7 Kbytes of executable code.

The quantum corral stores data. Rhinovirus executes a program. Design a nanophotonic interfacebetween them and, in principle, you've got a computer only 100 times bigger than a silicon atom!

Today, the corral is considered an engineered device, while rhinovirus is viewed as a biological entity.Within the nano arena, though, the distinction is meaningless. Both are nanomachines, one built on asubstrate of metal, the other on a substrate of organic molecules. Bridging the gap will spark anexplosion of playful development as nanoscale devices are snapped together as if they were Lego

blocks. At first, technologists will replicate familiar devices like motors and switches, but soon they'llset out in entirely new directions. Nanocomputers will be cheap and plentiful, making it possible toembed the world with intelligence. Everything will have information-processing capability - every brick,bicycle, and body.

Scientists and engineers who come of age working in the nano arena won't cloister themselves indisciplinary guilds. They'll be equally adept with the tools of the bio lab, the chip fab, and the physicsdepartment. They'll be masters of bioinfonanotech.

Larry Smarr, a professor in UC San Diego's Department of Computer Science and Engineering,

directs the California Institute of Telecommunications and Information Technology.

Mission to Mars, Utah

SPACE SPACE: Isolation as Lifestyle

By Hans Ulrich Obrist and Rem Koolhaas

William J. Clancey has been to Mars - or the closest thing to it. Chief scientist for human-centeredcomputing at the NASA Ames Research Center, Clancey has led simulation experiments in the Arcticand the Utah desert where scientists and volunteers live for weeks at a time as if they were on the

IBM Almaden Research Center

8/10/2019 Wired Issue 11.06 June 2003

5/39

red planet. Affiliated with the Mars Society, Clancey's studies show how humans negotiate smallspaces - how we create routines and behaviors to capitalize on limited resources.

Wired:How and where did these simulated expeditions come about?CLANCY:Over the years there have been experiments by the Russians, by NASA, and by privateorganizations. The Mars Society started in 2001 in the Arctic, when we built the Flashline Mars Arctic

Research Station. Flashline was the dotcom that donated almost $200,000 to help us build the facility.The second one, called the Mars Desert Research Station, was built in the Utah desert. A third isbeing constructed by the European Mars Society and will be shipped to Iceland this summer. And afourth is being created by the Australian Mars Society; it is intended to be located in the desert ofsouthern Australia. The structures are all about the same size; 8 meters in diameter. The ones that arein the Arctic have two floors: an upper deck with eating, sleeping and working areas, and a lower deckwith the laboratory, toilets, and other facilities.

Mars Society

What are you looking for in your simulations? Are you looking for how comfortable people are,

how stable they are?Well, there's a distinction between a spacecraft - a vehicle or capsule barely large enough for peopleto move around in - and something that we think of as a building, like a space station. The currentspace station is the size of a three-bedroom home. But living in space for many years changes theway people use their space, their personal space. In the research stations that the Mars Society hasconstructed, we have this idea of the stateroom, a place - with a door, a table, and personal storage -where you can get away from people. We found that, after just two weeks, people who have acomputer connection prefer to go into their stateroom for many hours of the day, very often with thedoor closed. It was not that they had a problem with other people. It just seems that for this kind of

work, we like to have no distractions.

You've said that traveling to Mars will make future space travel "less scripted." What do you

mean by that?I mean that what astronauts would be doing wouldn't be planned in as much detail and so far inadvance, and they would not be monitored minute by minute, hour by hour. The main reason is that,with the distance of a mission to Mars, the time delay with Earth is so long (up to 20 minutes) that itprevents conversation, and people are required to use email. Also, the Apollo missions lasted only afew days, which you can actually plan down to the minute. But a mission of several years is too long tobe planned down to the minute - too much can happen. Another factor is the size of the crew. Whenyou have six people living alone and making decisions, they will develop their own type of autonomy.They have to be capable of acting on their own, not calling back every time there is a problem.

So the subjects are essentially pretending to go to Mars by living in the desert. What is your roleas a monitor?In April of 2002, I was most interested in having a "closed simulation": a really tight study of how we

8/10/2019 Wired Issue 11.06 June 2003

6/39

used the habitat - how we planned out time and adjusted our plans. So we needed to be reallyisolated, only speak to ourselves, without visitors, and use mail to communicate with the outside. Thisyear, we will be testing a wireless computing and communications system to help people navigate andschedule their time, and keep records of what they are doing. We'll have as many as 15 people, not allliving in the habitat, but mostly in the hotel near by, about five miles away.

What is your vision for the next 50 years?We are certainly capable, in 50 years, of having an Antarctica-style permanent science colony on themoon, and of having a space station located between the moon and Earth. And it is hard for me tobelieve that, in 50 years, we will not have made our first mission to Mars. There is good reason tobelieve that eventually there will be a more or less permanent base there.

Hans Ulrich Obrist is curator of the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.

Six Degrees of Interconnection

RELATIONSHIP SPACE: Meet Your Network Neighbors

By Duncan Watts

When we talk about distance, we almost always mean the space between objects or locations in thephysical world. And for good reason: Most of the time, that's the sort of distance that makes sense.But after a century-long revolution in communications and transportation, physical space can belimiting or even misleading. Sociologists have long thought in terms of social space, the gap between

individuals' wealth, education, ethnicity, or religion. More recently, however, social scientists andmathematicians have begun to examine another kind of distance, one increasingly important to ourunderstanding of the world: network space.

namebase.org

A fascinating (and deceptively simple) example of network space is the small-world phenomenon, theidea that anyone on the planet can be connected to anyone else through just six degrees ofseparation. Although the notion had been floating around in popular culture for much of the 20th

century, it was only tested in the late-'60s in an experiment conducted by social psychologist StanleyMilgram. Milgram gave letters to about 300 people in Boston and Omaha with instructions that theenvelopes ultimately reach a single "target," a Boston stockbroker. The letters could be sent only to apersonal friend of the current holder, who then received the same instructions. To the surprise of

8/10/2019 Wired Issue 11.06 June 2003

7/39

many, more than 60 of the letters reached their goal, changing hands, on average, only six times.Milgram's conclusion was that people who seem very distant in physical or social space may actuallybe closer than we imagine.

To account for this, we need to start thinking of individuals as nodes embedded in a complex web ofsocial, economic, and institutional ties. In network space, two nodes can be closely connected

regardless of their physical or social proximity. Physical and social influences don't go away, of course- often we know people because they live near us or share important characteristics such as educationor profession - but the relationship of these factors with network space has remained a mystery fordecades. Milgram, for example, was never able to explain why his experiment worked. Network data isdifficult to collect, and analysis of complex networks is nearly impossible without powerful computers.

In the past five years, we've begun to understand how network space plays out both within andbeyond the social world. The small-world phenomenon, it turns out, also shows up among power grids,neural networks, biochemical reactions, interlocking corporate boards of directors, collaborativenetworks of scientists, and even movie stars. Which is why Kevin Bacon appears to be the center ofthe cinematic universe. (It's just happenstance - any Hollywood actor would work just as well.)

In terms of our perception of the world, though, six degrees from someone is still a long way. We carea great deal about our friends (one degree), a bit about friends of friends we haven't met (twodegrees). But a friend of a friend of a friend? Someone three degrees away is, for all practicalpurposes, a stranger, no more relevant to us than someone off the street.

But what happens to them canmatter a lot. The explosion of HIV into a global pandemic, for example,was driven in part by the widely held perception that it was confined to gay men and intravenous drugusers. If you didn't know anyone "like that," you didn't have anything to worry about. But it turns outthat what happens beyond our limited network horizon can still hurt us. Or help us: We can't just callup a friend of a friend of a friend and request a job, but we can ask that person for help by making theright connections. In fact, we do this all the time, tracking down people by email, over the phone, or atcocktail parties by "networking."

Now that we're starting to understand network space, the implications of it are vast. Whether we'reconsidering contagious diseases, cultural fads, or trends in the stock market, we need to start thinkingin terms of networks. Sometimes they help us, and sometimes they hurt us - being connected can begood or bad. But either way, networks are always there. And when not just you but anyonecan beconnected to anyone else on earth in just six steps, what goes around comes around - faster than youthink.

Duncan Watts, the author of Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age, is associate professor ofsociology at Columbia University and an external faculty member of the Santa Fe Institute.

Wasteland

DUMP SPACE: Freedom From Order

By Rem Koolhaas

Flying over Lagos, Nigeria, we discovered a huge urban dump. It was smoldering. Like a reverseNiagara, a wall of smoke rose to the sky. From the helicopter, you could smell it. The dump should

have been awful, yet on its surface lived a community: improvised hovels, likely constructed from thecontents of the dump. This was the dump as housing, as territory, as livelihood.

8/10/2019 Wired Issue 11.06 June 2003

8/39

The dump is the lowest form of spatial organization. Pureaccumulation, it is formless, has an uncertain perimeter andlocation. The surface of the dump reveals only part of itscontents; the dump is fundamentally inconsistent andunpredictable. But it has potential; it attracts scavengers.

Things and people that are dumped have somehow lost theirprevious usefulness - once they were something, now they arewaste. They don't work; they are empty; they are beyondresuscitation (or love or respect), no matter how modest.

Fresh foods and things that still work are stored with care, kept inspecial climatic conditions, assembled with a degree of formalprecision - with premeditation and organization - in piles,mountains, racks, shelves. Only the worthless is dumped. Theworthless no longer has any right to geometry, to order. To bedumped is to be condemned to the world of disorder.

But in an overorganized world - a groaning, decrepit universe ofsystems - the shapeless and the worthless have a new value, a new allure. The dump is free fromconstraints, from selection, from the tyranny of style.

New Frontiers

The Geography of Change

By AMO

At the start of the 20th century, 10 percent of the earth's population lived in cities. By the end of thisdecade, 50 percent will be urban dwellers. By 2015, there will be 58 metro areas with more than 5million inhabitants each. Of these enclaves, 48 will be located outside the developed world. The lower-profile cities - those like Bombay, Lagos, and Dhaka - are flourishing the most, while traditional mega-metropolises, such as London, Osaka, and Detroit, are stagnating.

The world's population booms and busts every 60 minutes. Here's a look at the net population changeper hour - from migrations, births, and deaths - for the fastest-growing and fastest-declining cities.

AMO

8/10/2019 Wired Issue 11.06 June 2003

9/39

AMO

NEW CONTENDERS

The United States, Europe, Japan, Canada, andAustralia now form an inner circle of affluence andpower. Due to their already high level of prosperity,these countries are finding it difficult to improve theirclout and wealth. Meanwhile, less mighty but morepopulous contenders like China and India are closingthe gap.

AMO

8/10/2019 Wired Issue 11.06 June 2003

10/39

NEW ISLANDSFor decades, multinationals and smaller-scalescoundrels alike have turned to regulation-light islandnations to set up tax havens. Extend the metaphorand you find new chains of so-called islands emergingto evade the long reach of government intrusion. Even

as globalization fosters uniformity, these "developing"nations exploit differences.

NEW POLITICSPolitical change is fueled by fresh ideas. From the USProgressive movement of the 1900s to the PragueSpring to last decade's Gingrich revolution, new waysof thinking give birth to bold policies. These days, thefreshest political ideas are coming from two verydifferent sources: the activist left and theestablishment right.

The left is fueled by a loose network of activist groups.Their preferred method: massive demonstrations,

organized largely through the Net. On February 15,groups like Attac, People's Global Action, and Unitedfor Peace and Justice orchestrated F15, the first everglobal protest against war in Iraq.

On the right, think tanks are a hotbed of activity. Anew conservatism is flowing from a network of policyshops, where the free exchange of both businesscards and ideas is transforming governments in

America, Europe, and Asia.

AMO

AMOThink tanks are a hotbed of activity on the right.

8/10/2019 Wired Issue 11.06 June 2003

11/39

NEW GLOBALISTSThe world's 30 largest multinationals (based onrevenue) all hail from one of three places: the UnitedStates, Europe, or Japan. Only one - the US PostalService - lacks a global presence, while the 30 biggestcompanies outside these areas (historically known as

the Group of 7 nations) tend to serve local or regionalmarkets closer to home. Nearly half of thesemultinationals outside of the G7 are mining theircountry's natural resources.

Last year, China showed the greatest growth on thelist, with 10 companies, ranging from telcos to banks -a jump from only three firms in 1995, according to theFortune Global 500. Each of these outfits is state-owned and dependent on the internal China market.But other companies on the list of emergingmultinationals have found a way to go global - evenfirms that began by serving markets in their own

respective countries. Take, for instance, some of the top companies in South Korea: LG International,Hyundai Corp., and Samsung Corp. All three are industrial conglomerates that started out asimport/export trading divisions for their products but have since branched out. LG Internationalprocesses and sells food and clothing; Samsung does construction; Hyundai is involved with the steelindustry.

These maps chart 60 headquarters, roughly scaled to company revenues, and mark the variousworldwide offices (Note: these maps are cropped and resized for online publication).

Pick up a newsstand copy of Wired magazine 11.06 for complete graphics of the numbers andtrends shaping theGeography of Change.

Atlas design and conception: AMO: Markus Schaefer, Reinier de Graaf, Theo Deutinger, Nanne deRu

Now Hear This

VOICE SPACE: When Space Starts Speaking. We Listen.

By Paul Elliman

Our cities can finally talk to us. Using just a few words at a time, they speak from the walls and ceilingsof buildings, from elevator cars, supermarket checkouts, and subway trains - offering directionaladvice, even warnings. It may not amount to a full dialog, but through a range of technology, involvingrecordings as well as complex language-modeling programs, our movement can now be guided by thevoices of audio signage.

These spoken forms of public information occupy their own place in the city, an acousmatic space.The term comes from film, describing characters that speak but remain concealed; "mysteriouscharacters," as French critic Michel Chion describes it, "hidden behind curtains, in rooms or hideouts

robots, computers, ghosts." But these sounds, this space, has transcended the cinema and made itsway into everyday life - even if audio signage retains a theatrical quality, as if this were necessary tothe messages it imparts. In a survey carried out by London Underground, the favorite choice for a"redesign" of its public address system was a voice-impersonation of Marilyn Monroe.

AMO

8/10/2019 Wired Issue 11.06 June 2003

12/39

Corbis Sygma

The voices of audio signage fall between the scripted characters of both typography and cinema. Liketypefaces, they convey distinctive identities. But we also recognize in their tones the lush advertisingsirens of Blade Runnerand Minority Report, or the authoritarian chill in the speech of the Wizard ofOz. Certain voices may turn out to have even closer associations with power and authority than meetsthe ear. New York subway-car announcements feature presenters from Bloomberg radio, the stationowned by the mayor, Michael Bloomberg.

Airports and railway stations were some of the first places to adopt talking signs. Since the 1970s,"Mind the gap" - advice from former radio presenter Peter Lodge to take care when stepping from theplatform into a train - has been a sonic landmark for anyone visiting London. But audio signage hasmoved beyond simple one-line directives to more complex systems. On the Madrid subway, therecorded voices of a man and a woman perform a sequence of short duets just before each station.

The man opens with "Prxima estacin"and is closely followed by the woman, who identifies the stop:"Plaza de Castilla."With the persistence of a running commentary, the friendly female voice of theShanghai subway follows you from train to platform, to ticket hall, to street, pointing out safety featuresand directions, suggesting bars, restaurants, and department stores.

Beyond the messages' vocal friendliness or familiarity, a more significant feature of acousmatic spaceis that the spoken words seem to come from nowhere, their infrastructural origins carefully concealed.Rather than being talking ghosts in the machine, these characters are a sequence of repeated speechpatterns. The voice, once thought of as uniquely human, is a new benchmark in our relationship withtechnology - talking and walking us though the acousmatic spaces of the city. In an elevator on the26th floor: "The doors are now closing." In the carriage of a subway car: "Change here for connectinglines to 4, 5, and 6 trains." Moving though an automated checkout in a supermarket: "Thank you, have

a great day."

Paul Elliman is a London-based designer and assistant professor at the Yale School of Art.

Migrant Labor

OFFICE SPACE: Where do You Want to Work Today?

By Rem Koolhaas (Guest Editor)

8/10/2019 Wired Issue 11.06 June 2003

13/39

George T. Shaheen

Ever since designers reinvented the workplace as a landscape of movable parts, flexibility has beenthe mantra of corporate offices. With modular cubicles, furniture on wheels, and wireless technologies,

the office would become a generously hospitable environment that could be endlessly reconfigured.But the promise of vacancy-on-demand is now being fulfilled less by a flexible workspace than by anomadic staff. Photographer Jacqueline Hassink explored this theme in Mindscapes, her exhibit onpublic and private office space.

At Accenture's Chicago office, the lobby looks like a living room, a cluster of workstations like a caf.Many employees change desks every day, with only impersonal cabinets as a permanent base."There's hardly any private space anymore," Hassink says. Without the sheen of futurism, thecommunal cool of flexibility is making way for the anonymity of generic space.

Jacqueline Hassink

Martha Stewart is Editing Your Life (That IncludesYou, Bill Gates)

HOME SPACE: Your Home, The New Public Plaza

By Beatriz Colomina and Rem Koolhaas

You once said in an article that your home in Westport, Connecticut, was "underutilized," and youdescribed Westport itself as a fairly grim example of isolation. You suggested there are fewer tiesbetween people, and their patterns have been eroded by the introduction of generic shops, all of

8/10/2019 Wired Issue 11.06 June 2003

14/39

which is making the suburban experience thinner and thinner. Do you think your audience views you,to some extent, as a virtual antidote to their isolation?

STEWART: Thereisisolation between houses in the suburbs. Thehomes I like the best are totally occupied, busy, and useful, whetherit's a tiny little house or a great big one. Rarely do you find a great bighouse that's used in a good way. So I prefer smaller spaces that are

full of books, full of things that people are doing. My favorite room ismy sister's kitchen, with three computers on the table, the sewingmachine, all the thread, the patterns, the animals, pots on the stove.It's that lively hub that really attracts me. All I really want is a three-room house. The home I have designed at my new farm in Bedford,New York, is a three-room house: bedroom on top, living room in themiddle, and kitchen on the ground. My new apartment in Manhattan istwo rooms - two floors, really - but two rooms. The Bunschaft house [inEast Hampton] that I bought interested me because it was threerooms. That's all I want. It fits me, fits my lifestyle.

But you have already mentioned eight rooms. Each house is small,but they add up to eight rooms.

Ah, but my houses, Rem, are my laboratories, so I have to have them. They are all different styles, soI can experiment: How do you cope with the modern way of living in an 1800 house, a 1925 house, a1960 house, and a 2001 house? Bill Gates' house, for example, is totally out of date now. He built itright before wireless happened. The big tunnels for all his wires - he doesn't need any of that stuffanymore.

So it's aging faster than homes that are more traditional?Right.

Why do you think so many people want to learn from you?Well, we have been editing, and editing, and editing - rooms, and living spaces. I can go in a room andjust take out, take away.

But you described your favorite room as a prototype of completely unedited living. So this is my realquestion: Living, traditionally, was unedited. Yet you're a huge editor, and you're hugely successful. I think people realize that in that edited space can be life. Nobody complains that our sets look emptyand devoid, because we build them as real rooms. The sets for my television show work - they areenlarged copies of my real spaces.

What do you think your audience does with your advice? Do they turn their houses into MarthaStewart houses?No! I don't go into people's houses and see me everywhere, not at all. They get ideas from ourmagazines, our publications, and our TV show. That's how they get inspired.

What would you say has changed in the experience of the home in the past 20 years?The biggest challenge has been incorporating technology. It's hard, in an old home, to become wired.The complicated nature of the building makes it very hard to get wires out of view.

Is there anything that you think ought to be invented to make all of us happier?I have a dream - a computer screen that can be anywhere. It would be voice-activated - I'd like to beable to talk to my screen, on my refrigerator or on my wall. I'm busy, I'm always running around, so Iwant instant on/off. I know it can be done. The homemaker doesn't want to wait. She wants to maketime to do other things.

Have you talked to anybody about this?I've talked to Steve Jobs, and to Bill Gates' crew, about a technology for the homemaker, but they'renot interested. So I'm developing my own software, a home organizer. It tells you what kind of curtain

you could make and gives you a pattern and the yardage. It gives you proportions with which you candesign your room. It also tells you how much water your house used last August - no need to go backto the paper file. I want my utility company, my insurance company, to send me everything viacomputer. I call it living by synopsis. It's very simple, but I think it will be very big. I've been thinking

Rem Koolhaas

8/10/2019 Wired Issue 11.06 June 2003

15/39

about this for five years, and we now have an outline for it. I presented it to John Doerr's guys [at theVC firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers], and they said, well, that's rather ambitious. It's notambitious, it just takes a long time.

Not only did you build an empire based on your taste, but now Martha Stewart is moving into newterritories - Japan, and possibly China. Is there anything that you would not want to export?

No.

Is taste exportable?Look, the world has become a smaller place. Access to the Internet has enabled every single cultureto relate to every other culture. I have China, the largest country in the world, yet to conquer - and Idon't mean conqueregomaniacally. I would love them to know about transferware [a type ofdecorated pottery] because, in fact, they developed it.

But let's make the question a bit more political. The unhindered progress of American civilization inmany different countries is beginning to register some resistance. Do you feel that?They hate us. But mostly for our politics, not for our lifestyle. They don't hate the way we cook; theyhate the way we behave. So I can't take any responsibility for any of that. All I can do is help

everybody, everywhere, live a little better.

Beatriz Colomina is an architectural historian and director of the PhD program at PrincetonUniversity's School of Architecture.

Trailblazer

BUSH SPACE: Looking Up and Down at the Same Time

By Sanford Kwinter

Rolex Awards / Eric Vandeville

In the far reaches of the Kalahari Desert, in southern Africa, researcher Louis Liebenberg is deployingwhat may be the first illiterate computers integrated into a hunter-gatherer society, a group known asthe San Bushmen. The desert natives, now thought to be the first people, are famous for theirmysterious capacity to decipher animal tracks, or spoor, in the natural environment. The plethora of

8/10/2019 Wired Issue 11.06 June 2003

16/39

specific data that a Bushman can extract from even a partial spoor has astonished scientists fordecades: This unusual ability is subtle and multispectral; it's steeped in an experience of nature thatrecognizes no division of life into distinct categories.

Liebenberg's handheld device allows a Bushman to enter spoor readings and other observations, hit abutton, and register, via satellite, the place and time of the observation. The information is transferred

to a central database, where it is correlated to produce a dynamic map of the location, and then usedto study ecological relationships, animal behavior patterns, and even poaching activity (a Bushmancan tell from a track whether an animal is fleeing a human or natural predator). The info is also used toinform guides about activities of scientific, documentary, or tourist significance, as well as for a widevariety of conservation applications.

Tracking is one of the longest continuous traditions of systematic knowledge in existence today. Butit's vanishing with alarming speed in the wake of such modernizations as the GPS transmitter, the all-terrain vehicle, state-administered animal husbandry, tourism, and so on. Liebenberg's workseamlessly connects the earth's oldest form of knowledge to its most modern, sophisticated, andautomatic counterpart. It represents an extraordinary moment in technology transfer. Indeed,Liebenberg has produced something akin to a Stone Age computer by hacking into a bygone world.

Sanford Kwinter, author of the forthcoming Far From Equilibrium, is a New York-based writer whoteaches design at Rice University.

Quiet Riot

PROTEST SPACE: When Speech is Zoned, is it Free?By Sarah Whiting

The public image projected during the G8 summit in July 2001 could not have been more imperial.Thirteen-foot barbed steel fences demarcated two restricted zones within the historic center of Genoa,Italy: Red, for residents and delegates, and Yellow, under police control, for demonstrators. Voided oflocal activity, the city gained an urbanism of eerie luxury; emptiness blanketed the normally Fiat-filledstreets surrounding the Palazzo Ducale. The silence caused some journalists to compare themetropolis to medieval towns hit by the bubonic plague. They were wrong. The minicity that emergedin Genoa belonged entirely to the 21st century. The streets were cannily rezoned, with physical spaceneatly containing and curtailing speech and action. Organized protest had met the security state'sscience of crowd control: free speech zoning.

Armin Linke

8/10/2019 Wired Issue 11.06 June 2003

17/39

Urban zoning originated in 19th-century Europe as a tool for regulating land and building uses. Themovement grew out of concerns over the way cities were being transformed by industrialization. In theUS, New York's 1916 Zoning Ordinance codified the size and location of skyscrapers to allow light toreach the streets below. But by the time of Genoa 85 years later, regulations had shifted from heightand land use to limits on population density and access. From a tool of permanence and planning,zoning became an instrument of transience and politics.

Today, our public sphere - spaces where people can freely exchange opinions, including physicallocales like cafs as well as figurative ones like newspapers - appears to be imploding. What we callpublic is being radically compressed into, at best, mere megabytes. Genoa will forever beremembered as the summit whose carefully calibrated precincts were pierced by the haunting death of23-year-old protester Carlo Giuliani. The Red Zone's meetings were far less attractive to cameras thanthe colorful cacophony surrounding them, and many of the 430 people injured in the Yellow Zoneshared media airspace with G8 heads of state.

If Genoa partitioned free speech, subsequent G8 conferences have pushed it even further from theaction. The 2002 meeting was held in Kananaskis, Alberta - a region so remote that even delegateshad difficulty reaching it. And the 2003 venue of Evian, a French spa town squeezed between amountain and a lake, explicitly excluded protesters from Evian itself - forcing them onto Web sites,where they plotted a blockade of the town's access roads.

Armin Linke

Such Web activism has blurred the distinction between organized and spontaneous speech. Web-fueled protests, such as those this spring against the war in Iraq, offer the perfect Alice-in-Wonderlandescape hatch from Genoa-like controls. For all its benefits, the Web remains a virtual space. To theextent it enables speech to break free of containment, it is a welcome tool. But it isn't altogether thesolution. Our Free Speech Zone needs a new shape, one with less mapping and more latitude. If it'sdull nostalgia to dream of caf politics, it's deliberate neglect to stand by while dialog and debate arezoned out of our democracies.

Sarah Whiting is an assistant professor at Harvard's Graduate School of Design and is a designprincipal at the architectural firm WW.

Life in the Bust Belt

BOOM SPACE: What's Left After the Thrill is Gone?

By Po Bronson

8/10/2019 Wired Issue 11.06 June 2003

18/39

Each night it's a different hotel or country club, a different speaker. The script is always the same:Hang in there. Cycles are inevitable. The Valley will recover. It always has.

Tonight, the location is the Menlo Circus Club, which is not in Menlo Park but in Atherton, the toniest ofthe Valley's bedroom communities. Those wearing name tags are alumni of UC Berkeley's HaasSchool of Business. The speaker who takes the podium is the economist and former politician Tom

Campbell, elected five times to Congress as the representative of Silicon Valley. He is now the dean ofthe Haas School.

Eddie Opara (2x4)

Campbell's no fool. It's hard to find the shine today on what just yesterday was the shining newmetropolis, our New Jerusalem. "I'm supposed to be happy and upbeat," he laughs, knowing he's gotonly crumbs to be upbeat about. "The recovery has been soft because the recession was soft."Unemployment isn't really so bad: 6.8 percent. Under the spell of his commanding confidence, thename tags forget that regional unemployment would double if one counted the legions who have eitherstopped looking for work or packed up and left the Valley in U-Hauls over the past two years.

"We need the Next New Thing," he admits. He believes biotech will drive the Valley's economy. PageMill Road is now lined with biotech and medical-device companies. Campbell is calm and assured -and for a moment, the audience forgets that most of them can't get a job in biotech, because theirdegree is a master's in business, not a PhD in immunology.

When pressed, Campbell insists his optimism is a matter of faith in the underlying value system thathatched the Valley's many booms: "We believe in widely disseminated information," he says. "Webelieve in liberty. We're comparatively non-prejudicial - in the Valley, it's what you've done, not whoyou are. It's what you believe, not who your family is. We believe in the ability of the individual in acountry that allows us to be free." In other words, give individuals with vision access to lots of capital,loosen the reins of bureaucracy, and they cannot help but build the future.

Of course, Campbell's right. The Valley simply overbuilt. It absorbed the hit, scaled back, and now

quietly marches on. Cisco and eBay and Yahoo! and Oracle will continue to grow. Unemployment willdrop a point or two. The freeways will be jammed soon enough. There'll be passengers on the directflight from San Jose to Austin. Some startups will even get funded, and there'll be an IPO or two.

But what then?

What will life in the Valley be like then?

What is the paradigm for Valley 3.0?

When the tech economy recovers, will the area regain its stature in the national consciousness? Will itrank again with Washington, Hollywood, and Wall Street as one of the great power centers of the

world? Will it once again be considered an exporter of the future - not just in terms of technology of thefuture, but of pop culture and business strategy?

8/10/2019 Wired Issue 11.06 June 2003

19/39

I don't think so. As a regional economy, Silicon Valley will steam ahead splendidly; as an icon,however, it's over.

Eddie Opara (2x4)

There has always been a Valley, but it only became an icon with the PC revolution and the arrival ofApple as a glamour company. Then the Internet exploded, and the Valley itself became glamorousand meaningful. The paradigm was creative destruction, or cannibalistic capitalism. To survive here,everyone needed to be mentally prepared to jump ship at a moment's notice. The basic building blockof the economy was the entrepreneur, and every individual needed to think more like an entrepreneurand less like an employee. Jazzed by this new ethic, laid-back Generation X turned into the self-determinist Generation Equity. Average job tenure in 1999 was 15 months. We assumed that Moore'slaw applied to far more than chips. It applied to everything- bandwidth, user bases, even the Nasdaqdoubled every 18 months. The result was beyond just an exciting new technology - it was a newculture that both captured the world's imagination and had it running scared. Rich people in New Yorkfelt poor. Smart people in Redmond felt stupid. Producers in Hollywood spoke a whole new lingo.Every Fortune 500 company felt vulnerable to itty-bitty startups. Silicon Valley was an argument in the

form of a place. It argued for a new way to live, a new relationship between owners and employees, anew bond between work and play.

I told the Valley's story in those years, and ever since, people have felt comfortable telling me theirthoughts about work. I'm seeing a very different type of culture emerging in Silicon Valley today. Thenew model is far more reminiscent of Valley 1.0 (the PC revolution of the '80s) than Valley 2.0 (theInternet revolution).

For the most part, workers are happy to have a life back. "It's just a paycheck now," said one woman Irode Caltrain with. "I'm all right with that." At San Jose's Tech Museum of Innovation, I got into aconversation with a former headhunter, now doing HR. "The subsector of the industry that profitedfrom chaos isn't counting on a recovery. Ever." She used to eat at trendy restaurants; now the

highlights of her week are a regular dinner with friends (alternating among their apartments) and thevolunteer tutoring she does at an elementary school. She says, "The question 'What do you do?' nowrefers more to 'How do you pay the bills?' than 'What is your purpose?'"

As for the famous passion that used to motivate so many worker bees, a guy in the weight room at thePacific Athletic Club in Redwood Shores said it best: "How many people can honestly say that theyare really passionateabout selling 'ERP software solutions to Fortune 100 enterprises'?" People areworking, and working fairly hard, but most would rather be doing something else, if they weren't afraidof living on half the income. One Web developer told me, "I keep my dreams close, but as fantasies,not as ventures I'd ever pursue." There's a powerful desire to help others. A project manager says, "Idream about actually feeling connected to the community and to people around me - and being able tocontribute to the greater good."

This attitude - Johnny Paycheck Smells the Roses - is prevalent not just among the worker bees. Iinterviewed a CEO who was resigning to become a venture capitalist, primarily so she wouldn't haveto work such long hours. A VC I once wrote about now holds forth about his newborn son far more

8/10/2019 Wired Issue 11.06 June 2003

20/39

than about his portfolio of investments. Yet another has invested a lot of time improving hisrelationship with his two daughters - and very little time investing money.

Perhaps most telling is a newfound and poignant reluctance when it comes to startups. Says one SanFrancisco entrepreneur who founded three companies, "I never want to start another company again. Isaw an ugliness in human character that destroyed my faith in the common man." And netted him $9

million. Most people's gains were far more modest, like this Netscape alumnus: "I made enough to payoff my student loans and buy a decent car. Was it worth it? Sure. Would I do it again? No way. I'mhappier with a paycheck and knowing I'll be able to show up for my guitar lessons on Tuesday andThursday nights." The other evening I met a woman at a Ben Kweller concert. She turned down joboffers from two startups to stay at her "boring, no-upside" job at CBS MarketWatch. "I've been laid offtoo many times," she said. "I don't want to go through it again for a while."

I don't think this new attitude is temporary. I see a great deal of nesting going on. Despite the crashand the resulting disruption, more marriage licenses were granted in 2001 in San Francisco than anyyear prior. In Santa Clara County, more babies were born in 2002 than in any year of the boom, andhouse purchases have bounced back to near-record levels, despite the massive evaporation ofwealth. The culture of shifting alliances and temporary agreements is out; permanence and settlingdown is in.

I doubt startups will ever become commonplace again. Most new products will be funded anddeveloped through intrapreneur programs at well-established companies. Venture-funded startups willbe reserved for only the rare great ideas. They'll be highly watched anomalies, a spectator sport forthe average Highway 101 commuter.

The hype machine keeps puffing, but the truth is that the pace of change in Silicon Valley is no longerspecial or extraordinary. In the past few years, Hollywood has been transformed by reality television,which has created new fortunes and new stars. Washington has swapped out an administration of24,000 Democrats and replaced it with 24,000 Republicans. Wall Street has been altered by new rulesgoverning conflicts of interest. The music and book industries have far more new products runningthrough their pipelines than the tech industry.

So while some might find Mr. Paycheck's workaday attitude disappointing, I think it's appropriate for acomputer industry that's slowed down. Silicon Valley 3.0 needs people who are good at working asingle problem for several years. The kind of people who don't find themselves saying, after only sixmonths, "Enterprise server software has gotten old." People who don't mind that it takes two years tobe promoted from Web engineer to bottom-rung manager.

Which is to say, what it doesn't need is people addicted to excitement -experience junkies, boomwranglers, and other hunters of the vertical learning curve. If you need glamour and buzz, grab thenext plane to somewhere else.

Debating the future has always been great conversational sport in the Valley. Lately, many

prognosticators have warned that if the Valley doesn't return to its radical cannibal ways, we'll wake upone day and be living in a new Detroit. I'm suggesting that if you look around with fresh eyes, you'llsee that we already do.

Automobiles are arguably the most disruptive technology of the past hundred years. They've changedthe way we live. Changed how our cities are organized. Changed the climate of the entire planet. Thefuel required for them shapes global politics. Detroit will keep on innovating at a manageable pace,putting out fresh models every year and new makes every few years.

But when you go to Detroit, you don't find a trend-bucking social culture. You find a conservativeworking-class society. So even though the Motor City's number-one export is still changing the worlddrastically (just wait till the middle classes of India and China start to buy cars), nobody looks to Detroitfor answers on how to live, how to structure companies, how to define the relationship between workand play. In fact, with its sprawling suburbs and huge unions, Detroit has long been a counterexamplefor how to organize a society.

8/10/2019 Wired Issue 11.06 June 2003

21/39

Silicon Valley will continue to export computer technology, much of which will continue to reshape theworld. But the Valley itself won't be a role model for anything. While the rest of the world will use ourtechnology, they won't want to live like us; they won't care what we talk about, they won't worship ourCEOs as leaders, or get excited about the newest startup. Silicon Valley 3.0 will be an industrial force,minus the magic that spawns imitation - a success again, but not the One True Way.

All of this is OK. The limelight's not necessary. The economic growth of the next decade won't comedisproportionately from those who are motivated by equity. It won't require hype and glory. It'll comethe old-fashioned way - from scientists and engineers who continually extend what we know, untileventually the impossible becomes possible through their cumulative effort. They're as likely to work atuniversities as at startups, funded by government grants rather than venture capital. They won't needthe promise of riches to conquer the unknown. They'll do it anyway. It's in their nature.

It's what they're trained to do.

It's their job.

Contributing writer Po Bronson (pobronson@pobronson.com), author of What Should I Do With MyLife?, wrote about the scientific study of prayer in Wired 10.12.

Inside Out

BODY SPACE: Fashion Continues to Outline the Female Body

By Miuccia Prada

Every piece of clothing shapes your body but also the spacearound you, the emptiness around you. This raincoat, from our2002 winter collection, plays off that divide. It's transparent, butwhen it gets wet - from rain or perspiration - it becomes opaque.So you have the space of the body and then also this other spaceoutside the clothes: It changes the relationship between what'sinside and outside. I tried it on - it happens in a very nice way.

Miuccia Prada directs the creative aspects of Prada. She

entered the family business in 1978.

The World Wide Lab

RESEARCH SPACE: Experimentation Without Representation is Tyranny.

Prada

8/10/2019 Wired Issue 11.06 June 2003

22/39

By Bruno Latour

The 20th century was the golden age of the laboratory. Answers to the great research questions weresought within cloistered chambers, where small groups of specialized experts scaled down (or up)phenomena in blissful isolation. Call it the era of trickle-down science: Knowledge emerged from aconfined center of rational enlightenment, then slowly diffused out to the rest of society. The public

could keep pace with the results of the laboratory sciences or remain indifferent to them, but itcertainly couldn't add to or dispute them, much less contribute to their elaboration. Science was whatwas made inside the walls where white coats were at work. Outside the laboratory's borders began therealm of mere experience - not experiment.

Today, all this is changing. Indeed, it would be an understatement to say that soon nothing, absolutelynothing, will be left of this top-down model of scientific influence.

First, the laboratory has extended its walls to the whole planet. Instruments are everywhere. Houses,factories, and hospitals have become lab outposts. Think, for instance, of global positioning systems:Thanks to satellite networks, geologists and biologists can now take measurements outside theirlaboratories with the same degree of precision they achieve inside. Meanwhile, a worldwide network ofenvironmental sensors monitors the planet in real time. Research satellites observe it from above, as if

the Earth were under a microscope. And geneticists examine entire populations as often asindividuals. The difference between natural history - outdoor science - and lab science has slowlyeroded.

Second, you no longer need a white coat or a PhD to research specific questions. Take theAssociation Franaise contre les Myopathies, a French patient advocacy group that focuses onignored genetic diseases. The AFM has not waited for the results of molecular biology to trickle downto patients in wheelchairs. It has hired researchers, pushed for controversial procedures like genetictherapy, and built an entire industry, producing at once a new social identity and a new researchagenda. In the US, the audacity to challenge the experts, to storm the labs, started with AIDS activistsand breast cancer groups; now it has spread to interested parties of all sorts, from patients whoorganize their own clinical trials to environmentalists who do their own fieldwork. A crucial part of doing

science is formulating the questions to be solved; it's clear that scientists are no longer alone in thisendeavor.

Third, there is the question of scale. The size and complexity of scientific phenomena under scrutinyhas grown to the point that scaling them down to fit in a laboratory is becoming increasingly difficult.Think of global warming: To be sure, labs are running complex models on huge computers. But howdo you simulate a phenomenon that is happening on us, with us, through the action of each of us asmuch as those of entire oceans and the high atmosphere? If the working hypothesis for globalwarming is that it's a product of anthropic activity, isn't the only way to test this hypothesis to stop ournoxious emissions and see - later and collectively - what has happened?

The sharp divide between a scientific inside, where experts are formulating theories, and a politicaloutside, where nonexperts are getting by with human values, is evaporating. And the more it does, the

more the fate of humans is linked to that of things, the more a scientific statement ("The Earth iswarming") resembles a political one ("The Earth is warming!"). The matters of fact of science becomematters of concern of politics.

As a result, contemporary scientific controversies are emerging in what have been called hybridforums. We used to have two types of representations and two types of forums: one, science,representing nature - here "representation" means accuracy, precision, and reference - and another,politics, representing society - and here "representation" means faithfulness, election, obedience. Asimple way to characterize our times is to say that the two meanings of representation have nowmerged into one, around the key figure of the spokesperson.

In the global warming controversy, some of those spokespeople represent the high atmosphere,

others oil and gas lobbies, others nongovernmental organizations. Still others represent, in theclassical sense, their electors (with President Bush representing at once his electors and the energylobbies!). The stark difference, which seemed so important, between those who represented thingsand those who represented people, has vanished. What counts is that all spokespeople are in the

8/10/2019 Wired Issue 11.06 June 2003

23/39

same room, engaged in the same collective experiment, talking at once about imbroglios of peopleand things.

Bruno Latour is a professor at the Center for the Sociology of Innovation in the Ecole des Mines deParis. An English translation of his Politics of Nature will be published by Harvard University Pressnext year.

Waiting To Exhale

TIGHT SPACE: Space is Most Precious When There's Not Enough of it.

By Brendan I. Koerner

For paranoid types spooked by sarin, VX, and other nastyairborne gases rumored to be part of the al Qaeda arsenal,masks are survival kit must-haves, alongside canned peachesand duct tape. But even the snazziest mask won't be of muchhelp if cast aside midattack, as countless soldiers have donesince the debut of mustard gas during World War I. As it turnsout, a surprising number of us would rather risk incinerated lungsthan wear protective headgear that makes us feel locked inside arubber prison.

Irrational, perhaps, but not to a soldier in the throes of gas mask

phobia. According to the US Army, some GIs are "unable totolerate wearing a gas mask for a few minutes, even in a peaceful garrison setting." The symptomsare panic-attack classics: shortened breath, blurred vision, severe disorientation. And though thechemical-attack sirens may blare, victims tend to fling their masks to the ground, opting for a violentdeath rather than spend one more second on the inside looking out.

Organizations that require protective gear - military units, hazmat disposal teams -try to weed outthe sensitive; to earn their suspenders, prospective firefighters are asked to search a confined areawearing a blackout mask, a 40-pound vest, and 4-pound ankle weights. But what if the sickness lurksdeep within a recruit's psyche, waiting to kick in at the worst possible moment?

Thus the crusade for a kinder, gentler gas mask - one that will feel more like a pair of bifocals than apiece of S/M fetish gear. Tiny eyepieces positioned well away from the face - which tend to makesome users feel they're sealed up in coffins - are being replaced by a single translucent PVC lens,giving masks the mono-opticon look of visored X-Mensuperhero Cyclops. Specially crafted CADsoftware helps designers factor in ergonomic data like nose slope and brow height.

Another problem for phobics: Traditional gas masks make breathing difficult. Inhaling through astandard mask filter is like slurping molasses through a straw. State-of-the-art filters, woven fromsvelte microfibers, require much less effort.

Comfort can't be everything, alas. Gas mask manufacturers have experimented with silicon-basedformulas. They're lighter than rubber and less apt to cause profuse sweating - but their permeabilitymakes it less effective against potent nerve agents. Silicon's OK for survivalists, but the military stickslargely with rubber - and prays for a minimum of freak-outs.

8/10/2019 Wired Issue 11.06 June 2003

24/39

Contributing editor Brendan I. Koerner (koerner@newamerica.net) wrote about the MIT Media Lab inWired 11.05.

Live Free or Die

ART SPACE: Building Bastions of Creative Freedom

By Hans Ulrich Obrist

There used to be an association between art and the ivory tower. Generic gallery space - the WhiteCube - seemed to give art a pristine and autonomous refuge from the clutter of commercialism. By the'90s, as the art world became part of the global economy, that cube became ubiquitous. Thisuniformity gave rise to a paradox: If art is supposed to be the language of individuality - of difference,even of freedom - why is it always displayed in a homogenous box, the world over?

Over the past 15 years, many artists attempted tobreak out of the White Cube. They began to exhibit inthe world: apartments, hotels, restaurants, privatehomes, public buildings, city squares, and metrostations. Some opened their own galleries. CityRacing in London and Glassbox in Paris establishedthe artist-run space as synonymous with a newliberty, a critical stance against the limited way inwhich art is traditionally made and shown.

Others went further, abolishing the gallery altogether,and conceiving a system in which artwork andartmaking were one. In Thailand, Rirkrit Tiravanija's

The Land is a collaborative, self-sustaining development in the village of Sanpatong. Prominent artistssuch as Arthur Meyere and the Danish group Superflex have contributed to it by designing toiletsystems, solar power generators, and a methane production apparatus.

In the most radical instances, artists established entire territories. Carl Michael von Hausswolff andLeif Elggren have identified a parasitic country that is the conceptual aggregation of the world's no-man's-lands and border crossings. The inhabitants of Elgaland-Vargaland form a post-nationalscattered community that includes ambassadors and embassies designated by expensive plaques,and has its own language, official papers, and insignia. Its passport was so well made that it workedfor crossing European borders - before 9/11, anyway.

In 2001, Joep van Lieshout turned his Atelier van

Lieshout - a design company that specialized inmade-to-order furniture - into AVL-ville, a "state" withits own currency, laws, restaurant, workforce,abattoir, sausage factory, and ecological toilets. AVLis clearly the work of a single visionary exercisingpervasive control over his state. The projectaggressively asserts its autonomy, from its emphasison borders and boundaries to its fascination withmilitary paraphernalia and its apparent regimentationof daily life. As the diagram here suggests, AVL'sartwork takes as its raw materials a series ofinterlocking systems of power, exchange,

adjudication, and commerce. The work itself both resembles and reflects the obsessions of the

surrounding nations, hence the obsession with defense and the establishment of social systems.

Whether playful, libertarian, or overtly flirtatious with danger, all of these examples confront us with abeyond-the-White-Cube dilemma: Art space may be the last refuge for the authoritarian imagination.

AVL/ARS 2003

AVL/ARS 2003

8/10/2019 Wired Issue 11.06 June 2003

25/39

Hans Ulrich Obrist is curator of the Muse d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. He also interviewedWilliam J. Clancey in this issue.

Almost Paradise

SEX SPACE: When the Exotic Imitates the Everyday, What's Left to Fantasize About?

By Rem Koolhaas (Guest Editor)

Tokyo has always been known for its "love hotels," elaborately designed spaces where denizens ofone of the most densely populated cities on earth can steal a few moments' intimacy. Now some of thecity's brothels are just as carefully appointed. Known as imekura, short for "image club," these

imitations of quotidian spaces offer a fantasy that comes complete with a woman who plays the part -whether that's a secretary in an office or a commuter on a subway. As Kyoichi Tsuzuki's photographsshow, they're mundane rooms transformed into fantasy chambers - and vice versa. In a city whereanything seems architecturally possible, the ultimate erotic fantasy is that of everyday existence.

Kyoichi Tsuzuki

The New Border Wars

BORDER SPACE: Lines in the Sand

By Jeff Howe

The border between two lands is more than a line; it reinforces the hopes and fears of the nations thatshare it. After the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, a vision of a borderless world emerged: one less afraid, thatwould rely on technology, not fences, to assert sovereignty. It didn't happen. Instead, there's been aprofusion of physical boundaries. The six maps here illustrate the methods - both old-fashioned andhigh tech - nations use to build walls in an anxious world.

1. The Colonial Border: the Strait of GibraltarThe southernmost cities of Spain actually lie in North Africa, the last vestiges of a colonial age in whichMorocco was a province of France and Spain. The port of Ceuta sits a mere 8 miles from theEuropean mainland across the Strait of Gibraltar; Melilla is some 150 miles east. In 1995, Spain andsix other European nations agreed to erase internal borders. Within months, illegal immigrants beganseeping into Spain's North African outposts. To stem the flow, Spain and the EU funded theconstruction of walls around both cities. Melilla's wall, completed in 1998, sealed its 6-mile border withparallel 10-foot fences topped with barbed wire. Ninety miles of underground cable connect spotlights,

8/10/2019 Wired Issue 11.06 June 2003

26/39

noise and movement sensors, and video cameras to a central control booth. A similar system in Ceutawas completed in 2001.

2. The Cold War Border: the Korean DMZCreated along the 38th Parallel in 1953 when South Korea, North Korea, the US and UN officialssigned the cease-fire agreement that halted the Korean War, the Demilitarized Zone is anything but.

Two and a half miles wide and 156 miles long, the DMZ is mostly barren land harboring some 1 millionland mines; it's bound by concrete antitank walls and crowned with concertina wire. President Clintoncalled it "the scariest place in the world." The US provides South Korea with sophisticated intelligence-gathering technology, such as heat-seeking scopes used at guard posts and recon from satellites andaerial surveillance.

3. The Pointless Border: the Ferghana ValleyThe historical heart of Central Asia - it was part of the Silk Road - the Ferghana Valley is a fertile plainshared by Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. After a civil war in Tajikistan and the discovery thatthe Ferghana's precipitous canyons sheltered Taliban-aligned Islamic fundamentalists, Uzbekistanlined its frontiers with thousands of land mines and heavily armed guards, an effort that hassucceeded mostly in killing scores of innocent villagers. International opinion holds that what little hopeexists for the ravaged economies of these republics lies in cooperative economic policies and freetrade. Uzbekistan's response has been to add more mines and guns along the border.

4. The Homeland Border: US and MexicoThe two primary objectives at the 1,989-mile US-Mexico border are largely at odds: expediting some$636 million in legal cargo per day and stanching the flow of illegal goods and immigrants. Since 9/11,Customs and Border Protection has employed a variety of Bond-like technologies. Detection devicesinclude handheld radiation pagers, the $1.3 million Vacis gamma-ray machine, and MobileSearchradiation portals for vehicles (Wired10.11). To speed legitimate traffic, CBP has launched the Sentrisystem: Frequent border crossers in El Paso, Texas, and in Otay Mesa and San Ysidro, California,affix transponders to their cars that beam digital photo IDs to inspectors who confirm the identity ofdrivers before waving them through.

5. The Contested Border: KashmirIndia and Pakistan have been fighting over Kashmir since 1947. The last full-scale conflict ended in1971, when the current 450-mile "line of control" was established. In the Karakoram Pass, in northernKashmir, some 10,000 soldiers face off across a front line that ranges from 9,000 to 22,000 feet inelevation, making this the highest-altitude conflict ever. And one of the most pointless: The area ispoor in natural resources and tactically insignificant. International observers say continued enmitybetween the countries amounts to a grudge match. That doesn't mean it's without portent. In 1999,Pakistani-sponsored mujahideen seized a ridge and nearly sparked a nuclear war. Several thousandsoldiers have died over the past two decades, mostly from high-altitude sickness, avalanches, or falls.

6. The Containment Border: the Gaza Strip and the West BankIsrael's policy toward the occupied territories is one of strict containment. It controls access to theGaza Strip through checkpoints along the lattice of roads, walls, and fences throughout the area.Along the West Bank, Israel is constructing what it calls a security fence - though the description is agross understatement. If fully built, the enclosure will consist of a network of barriers, including 10-footwalls topped with barbed wire and guard towers and employing motion detectors and video cameras.An 80-mile section is due to be completed in July. Plans call for the 230-mile barrier to follow the so-called green line marking Israel's border with the West Bank. In reality, the wall already juts well intothe area in order to keep Jewish settlements within Israeli territory.

The West Bank itself is fragmented into discrete sections of Israeli and Palestinian control connectedby tunnels and bridges and defined with barriers. In his essay "The Politics of Verticality," architectEyal Weizman notes that this is one of the few borders to fully embrace the vertical dimension: Israel,for instance, asserts its control of both the aquifer below the occupied territories and the airspaceabove them. The most extreme example of vertical borders was Clinton's 2000 Camp David proposal

that the Temple Mount be divided horizontally, giving Palestinians sovereignty over the mosque on thetop half and Israel sovereignty beneath the pavement, which includes the Wailing Wall.

8/10/2019 Wired Issue 11.06 June 2003

27/39

Contributing editor Jeff Howe (jeffhowe@wiredmag.com) wrote about the music labels' battle againstfile-sharing in Wired 11.02.

The [?]-Man March

CROWD SPACE: Bodies Count

By Farouk El-Baz

When crowds gather to make political statements, it matters how many people turn out. Crowd sizematters to organizers, who invariably say they made their point. It matters to police departments, whoinsist they fielded the right number of officers. It matters to the media, who often claim they've reported

the facts. And it matters to elected officials, who often like to act as if the whole thing never happened.

All of which is why February's antiwar demonstrations came under such close scrutiny. Consider whathappened in San Francisco. Organizers, whose tallies usually are made by observers at ground level,initially estimated turnout at 250,000 (later revised to 200,000). Police, who tend to eyeball their figuresfrom the air based on known counts such as stadium capacities, also claimed 200,000. But an aerialphoto survey commissioned by the San Francisco Chroniclecalculated just 65,000 at the peak time of1:45 pm.

Photographic analysis of the kind undertaken by the Chroniclecan provide a verifiable estimate, but itmust be done correctly. Here's how:

Fly over the crowd at peak times using a fixed-wing aircraft. (Shaky helicopter platforms blur photos,increasing the effort required to analyze them.) Altitude should be 2,000 feet or less.

Photograph the area in strips using a digital camera, with 60 percent overlap between successivepictures to allow stereoscopic viewing (helpful for making ambiguous pictures clearer). Imageresolution should be about 1 foot per pixel.

Load the photos in an image-processing program and co-register them with a 1-meter-resolution USGeological Survey orthophotomap - a perspective-corrected collage of aerial shots of the area with auniform scale.

Superimpose a grid on the image and classify its units by the apparent density of people per unit.

Place a cross or dot on each individual head or shadow point.

Count or, if necessary, estimate the number of people in each grid unit, then tally the numbers.

Calculate error - basically the number of grid units divided by the degree of uncertainty about howmany people they contain.

By these criteria, the Chronicle'ssurvey fell short. For one thing, it was based on analog photos, whichlose resolution when digitized. It also failed to co-register the images with an orthophotomap, and thegrid unit size was larger than 1 meter, too big for careful counting.

Still, the newspaper's effort was a step in the right direction. Where political interests are at stake, thejob of counting masses of people falls naturally to the media. It doesn't cost much - $2,000 to $5,000per event, depending on location and crowd size. A joint effort by news outlets and independent

8/10/2019 Wired Issue 11.06 June 2003

28/39

supervisors, especially in politically sensitive cases, would bring crowd counts out of the murky realmof guesswork and into the bright light of verifiable fact.

Farouk El-Baz directs Boston University's Center for Remote Sensing. He resolved the controversyover how many attended 1995's Million Man March.

The New Middle Kingdom

FUTURE SPACE: Where the Next World Will Happen

By Rem Koolhaas (Guest Editor)

At the 2010 World's Fair in Shanghai, China will show its modernized face to an internationalaudience. It may look something like this picture, an aspirational design for the fair submitted by theArchitecture-Studio of France. Along with the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, the fair represents amajor opportunity for foreign companies to increase their presence in China, especially if they can tapinto the country's media infrastructure. Born of the politburo propaganda machine, the state networkincludes national, regional, and local TV and radio stations, newspapers, magazines, and bookstores.And yet despite its size and reach, China's media is a closed system - state-controlled and self-sufficient. The question the Olympics and World's Fair presents, then, isn't whether foreign companieswill be able to tap the Chinese market. It's whether the Chinese market wants to tap them.

China Turns On

Population: 1.3 billion

GDP: $6 trillion

Increase in GDP (2000-2001): 23.6%

Labor force: 706 million

Total unemployment: 3.1%

Literacy rate (ages 15-24): 98.2%

Television sets: 400 million

TV viewers: 1.1 billion

Newspapers sold daily: 117.8 million (62 million more than in the US)

Books sold per year: 15.6 billion

Bookstores: 77,000 (65,000 more than in the US)

Annual spending on books, magazines, and newspapers: $8 billion

Total magazine circulation: 475.8 million

8/10/2019 Wired Issue 11.06 June 2003

29/39

The Enemy Within

SECURE SPACE: Walls Don't Work in Cyberspace

By Bruce Schneier

Internet security is usually described as a fortress, with the good guys inside the wall and the bad guysoutside. Network owners buy products to shore up the barrier, on the logic that a stronger wall will givethem better security. Flaws in the network are holes in the barricade, patches the mortar that closesthem.

This metaphor might have been appropriate 10 years ago, when the Internet was made up ofdisparate networks that occasionally communicated, but it's outdated today. There are too many of us,doing too many things, interacting in too many ways. The Internet is more like a town.

In a town, security space is fluid. Barriers exist, yet they're only part of the solution. Sometimes thebad guys are already inside, while the good guys are outside, needing a legitimate way in. As in a

town, Internet users interact with a number of people. We forge friendships of all sorts, long-lasting aswell as fleeting. We create our own spaces, both permanent and temporary. Good guys and bad guysintermingle. The same door that opens for customers allows in shoplifters; from the outside, there's noway to tell one from the other.

Because the Net is so often compared to a fortress, most Internet security relies on prevention. That'snot bad, but it's incomplete. Prevention is the least effective solution, because it's static and passive.In a town, security is a combination of prevention, detection, and response. There are walls - and alsoalarms and police. A town has a complex social structure that keeps its inhabitants safe. The Internetneeds a similar social network atop its digital network.

Detection and response are far more effective - and cost-effective - than increased prevention. Nobank ever says: "We have an impenetrable vault, so we don't need an alarm system." No museum

ever takes such pride in its door and window locks that it fires the night watchman. No home-securityexpert would ever recommend making your walls thicker.

I'd like to see security products and services that treat the Internet as a town instead of a fortress,monitoring those on the inside as well as keeping others out. For example, my security company,Counterpane, recently detected a pattern of suspicious activity in the system of a large airline that ledus to believe an employee was trying to break into the human resources server. We alerted the ITdepartment and traced the attack to a reservations office in Mexico City. The employee was caught inthe act and terminated.

I'd also like to see Internet users develop relationships with each other based on trust. The street youlive on matters more than the lock on your front door. Knowing your neighbors is more important than

knowing karate. And in both the real and virtual world, nothing improves security more thangentrification.

Security expert Bruce Schneier (schneier@counterpane.com) is the author of Beyond