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Bratton","content":"70. Is it curious that Google Earth and Maps, perhaps the most aggressively secular, pluralistic, universalizing cosmopolitan mapping technology realized to date, would serve at the center of this antisecular, antidemocratic politico-theological paroxysm? The attacks in Mumbai were, in the parlance of counterinsurgency, both irregular and asymmetrical. They were irregular in that the combatants were apparently armed civilian tourists rampaging through civilian spaces until the siege of uniformed men turned up, and asymmetrical in that the city (its buildings, its tourists, its state institutions) was assigned characterization by these armed tourists in a fight to which they did not know themselves enrolled. (Perhaps this is one social definition of terrorism: war fought against enemy-people who do not consider themselves enemy-combatants, and then as well largely against their architectural habitat as much as their persons.) Within this, the Mumbai event was an unwelcome innovation on more than one level. It was a highly coordinated but direct personal attack on the soft, leisurely substance of civil society more than on hard military or politically symbolic targets, looking more like what the Malay and Javanese call amuk (amok), than any Clausewitzian opposition of equals. Second, we see the strategic employment of locative social media and personal mapping technologies for the C3 (commandcontrol-communicate) project of mayhem. It is less Netwar (Samuel Weber ’ s term; such as the pulsing of logistics of a denial-of-service attacks on Estonia ’ s systems by Russian nationalists) than of a social/locative media-enabled swarming maneuver, both of and on the city engaged as itself a network of real and symbolic interfaces and here overrun by the capacities of real-time, collaborative situational awareness.\n\nIt precedes the Arab Spring and the Google doctrine by a few years, but it may represent a more essential lesson regarding the conjunction of mobile computing and urban spatial politics. A major source of unease (if not shock) for many in the liberal West was the souring of the Thomas Friedman-esque supposition that the cosmopolitan cognitive apparatus that is Google Earth must surely provide a world picture that is so open, objective, materialist, dialogic — and perhaps because so absent of visible human bodies that might invite contentious biopolitics — that it could not possibly be compatible, interoperable, instrumental with the closed, naturalist, idealist imagined collective geography of jihadist Islam. Isn ’ t Google Earth exemplary of all that makes the secular, technological pluralism of the West intolerable to fundamentalist institutions? It is a blank, purified vision of a planet somehow constructed as an objective integrated context onto and into which history might work, and simultaneously agnostic as to how anything arrives in its place or why. The jolt invited confused speculation about how “ a new reality ” in the spatial warfare of globalization had revealed itself: “ they ” are not immune to “ our ” most central terms and things because our modernity is also “ theirs. ” “ We do not control even what we control, ” goes the lament.\n\n71. Many of the most impressive interfaces are seen in science-fiction movies where they play a starring role to draw out the contours of fictional worlds. The Los Angeles – based studio oooii has developed many of the best. See http://www.oooii.com. Earlier historical examples of “ future interfaces ” can be found at the blog Paleofuture. The shift seen here in pop futurist media from pulp stories and architectural drawings to corporate-funded users from tomorrow is telling in and of itself. In the early 1990s, I wrote about a particularly cringe-worthy video, Connections: AT & T ’ s Vision of the Future, a story about how videoconferencing, fashion avatars, reversed-translation software, and holographic visualization will provide for so many good things: finding a good spouse, resolving intergenerational conflicts, not to mention architectural preservation. More recent examples focus on future health care, placing more attention on the soft pastel palettes and extra-light typefaces to suggest a world in which better UI is part of a safe, affluent lifestyle, and a central focus for domestic interior design. Health care is remade as a project of constant real-time self-regard and expert information management. Here the principal promise and achievement of the interfacial regime is to seal the biological habitat, policing risk and disorder with graceful gestures and visualizations. For a useful index, see Nelson Shedroff and Christopher Noessel, Make It So: Interaction Design Lessons from Science Fiction (Brooklyn, NY: Rosenfeld Media, 2012).\n\nNotes\n\n431","previous_page":430,"next_page":432}