Center for Urban Technology (CUT)

"The result in advanced industrial cities seems to be the emergence of urban landscapes made up of many superimposed layers of surveillant simulation. Each layer has its own finer and finer mosaic of socio-spatial grids; its own embedded assumptions and criteria for allocating and withdrawing service access; its own definitions for specifying the "acceptable" presence of individuals in different "cellular" spaces; and its own cybernetic loops of system feedback, within which systems of surveillance become ever more integrated into systems of simulation. the broad result is the development of social control systems of unprecedented intensity and power which are virtually invisible and unregulated. What is most worrying is that the more disturbing aspects of these trends tend to be virtually ignored within public debates about cities and technology. In fact, many are actually being welcomed under the banners of "improved customer service" or the use of technologies to provide technical quick fixes to the complex urban social problems of crime and alienation." [more]

"Information has been defined as a 'compromise between presence and absence', since it represents a 'form of something without the thing itself' (Latour 1987, p. 243). Communication is, thus, 'being; persons literally occupy the media they use; their existence cannot be separated from these symbolic systems' (Adams 1995)." [more]