Newer Search software works by making the world itself into the operant interactive metaphor for the world itself. Google Earth's interactive map/search/data visualization software, borrowing its interface aesthetics from previous generations of satellite-image-based battlefield simulation suites, promises to further incorp6rate personal logistics of everyday life into the tropics of "intelligence. " Its open API (application programming interface) also allows users to link Google Earth to other data streams, personal and public, furthering tipping the logic of its performance from that of a "map with interactive capabilities, " toward that of a real "meta-interface" based on cartographic, diagrammatic metaphors.
Just as diagrams become interfaces, computation also transforms physical urban interfaces by making them in turn increasingly diagrammatic. "In all parts of the world .. . implanted at the edges of cities, highways or railways . . . [is a] whole apparatus that is only the reconstitution of the various parts of the fortress motor, with its flankings, its gorges, its shafts, its trenches, admission to and escape from portals, the whole primordial control of the masses by organisms of urban defense" (40) . Of the masses of things, that is. Today the urban interfaces of material exchange between supply chains and demand chains include ports of entry, now refitted as computationally-intensive logistics parks, which serve as regional switching mechanisms for the routing of components and the formation of geographically distributed assemblies of producers and consumers. There is a dromological heaven in these. The United Arab Emirates currently plans a truly Modern city of the future in their own in Jebel Ali, the Dubai Logistics City, which hopes to dwarf the strategic centrality of competing hubs in Rotterdam, Singapore, Shanghai and elsewhere by providing seemingly endless acreage of sea-air and air-air multi-modal passenger and cargo services: "merge-in-transit, customization, postponement, packaging and labeling, and final assembly." Today our visionary architecture is designed not for the care and habitation of people, but as a utopia of and for objects.
18
Speed and Politics