- It is clearly not the annulment of dissensus, because in the absence of real politicization of fundamental conflict and the proliferation of incompatible and often unredeemable cosmographies, the only positions of dissent end up being those of the irredentist, the humanist, and the fundamentalist. That is an unsustainable trinity.
- Behold the Schengen Cloud, New Arizona, Transcalifornia, Hong Kong West, the Alibaba-Tesla Printing and Charging Station franchise network, NTT-DoKoMo Planet Tokyo retirement towers and robo-spa, Google Continent Cloud, Tata-IIT-Khan Academy primary schools, the Confederate States of Walmart, RadTransFem GMOrganic Foods and Soil Stewardship (based in Fresno), the Apple-Pixar-Genentech Alliance, and so on.
- Consider once more Estonia ’ s program to extend “ e-citizenship ” to those who do not physically reside inside its land borders. See https://e-estonia.com/e-residents/about/.
- The anarchist-artist dream of autonomous secession by sabotage, refusal, anonymity, and delinking is part of the problem. Localism (individual or communitarian) means inside these sturdy walls. A political philosophy inordinately nervous about the ambiguities of transaction externalities will have to build increasingly more elaborate justifications. The simplest is to simply wall off the external altogether so that it cannot intrude, interfere, or enforce a division of labor.
- See the full RFC at http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc761.
- The reversibility of the line, between inside and outside, exit and entrance to or from what, tracks the reversibility of utopia and dystopia. The utopian perfect island may be projected into the present for the totalitarian, into the fundamentalist ’ s past, or into the modernist ’ s future. The dystopian is sometimes the aberration that merely smudges the utopian absolute, ruptured from the inside by the revenge-seeking tabula that was not so rasa after all. At other times, as in many Philip K. Dick fictions, the dystopian is more like the nightmare that turns out to be an dream of unforeseen redemption or unforeseeable enlightenment. As the utopias and their reversals (which may be dystopian, or perhaps not) begin to pile up and reflect onto the diagonal surfaces of one another, insides and outsides multiply, and the exit and entrance dynamics becomes less intelligible as the borderlines intersect in volumetric space. Those lines seem to reverberate and blur, doing double duty to hold something in and out, but as we will see, these may not be imprecise traces of something definite; rather they are also meticulous representations of something ambiguous.
Further, the reversibility of the line can help design or make its job impossible. Every new historical phase of information technology seemed to bring a promise of universalism, or of at least of an integration of global community and communication. At the same time, perhaps every “ imagined community ” congeals through its particular ways of reading and being read by media technologies unevenly arranged across the world. Any universality that does arrive may be that societies are subdivided from one another according to the same means, and so share this cycle of consolidation and forking, both real and imagined. Any line drawn with purpose pushes and pulls against this, knowingly or unknowingly, partitioning and framing its additions on an always rotating plane. Any project of metadesign is then faced with some crisis of confidence. As it becomes technically easier to draw a line, it is that much harder to know whether that line is linking or delinking, gathering something in or fencing something out. Because of this, not despite it, the right of design has to be equal to that of voice in the automanagement of those societies subdivided from one another as they share the common limitations of mutual intersection. It also means that the basic social problematics of cohabitation remain.
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Notes