Benjamin Bratton’s Interview in The Guardian on Cities, Innovation, & Capitalism

I really enjoyed reading Benjamin Bratton’s latest interview in The Guardian. Here are some experts of my favorite parts. You can read the rest of the interview here.

Perhaps the main points of conflict for the near future for cities are between formal and informal urbanism on the one hand, and “open” vs. private urbanism on the other. Informal open spaces in many of the world’s fastest growing megacities are sites of both tremendous misery and tremendous vitality and invention. They are laboratories. For what, we don’t know yet. We also see the predominance of private, highly curated and securitized environments as a preferred affluent experience. Disney pioneered the top-down designed environment, but certainly it is a program that is global: from Apple to Dubai. (I see the Android vs. iOS theological schism ultimately playing out at the level of the digital environments we want to program. The hardware at stake is the city itself.)

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That said, I don’t believe that innovation ultimately comes down to people’s attitudes so much as to systemic opportunities for ideas to actually take root and scale. Part of the reason that the internet was able to support innovation from so many different places is that it was built on standard platforms and protocols that allowed each point-of-reception to also be a point-of-production. Because of platform neutrality —this is an ideal version, I realise— something that starts in one location can scale to become a global technique with less interference.

What if cities worked the same way? For me good urbanism means a healthy and playful mix of programs, of chance encounters, of interesting relationships with strangers, of cooperative experiences that are not dictated by shopping and entertainment, or worse, by security.

As bits and atoms interweave more closely into digital urbanism, this could produce very dull and lifeless spaces, with everyone locked into a “Groupon phenomenology” of point-chasing and accumulation, like autistic squirrels. Or it could turn the global city —our shared site condition— into a different sort of game, one with much more interesting and generative rules. “Beneath the pavement is a beach.”

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 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri write about the “commonwealth” as an opposite of the basic capitalisation of resources. If capital’s primary thrust is to bring things that are outside of the market into the market (land, genomes, languages, whatever) then what is the opposite of that process? Not “public” or “state” property, but a movement of something being the property of capital to being essentially unknowable at all. It goes from private property back to “not property.” One of the effects of digital media has been to transform things (music, software, movies, cultural labor of all sorts) that used to have a high exchange value and make them all but un-ownable. Recorded music has almost no exchange value. We still like it but we don’t buy it very much, and when we do we are mostly buying the service convenience of not having to deal with unreliable torrents.

In the long run, one of the deep effects of planetary computation (and I believe that history is largely still to come) may be a movement toward these kind of “commonwealths” but in parallel with an equally powerful movement toward the capitalisation and privatisation of everything imaginable. Perhaps these two processes somehow depend on each other?