The only assignment for the Applications class (other than the presentation) is to ride the M5 bus from start to finish, and back, then write a 5 page paper about surprises and observations.
I decided to have some fun with it, and wrote it from the POV of someone from 1100 years in the future, experiencing a simulation constructed from the years of media recorded by previous generations of ITP students.
Keep reading after the link if you want the whole thing...
Dérive through Manhattan, New York, October 29, 2006
I have been looking forward to this assignment for months, not just for the access to resources that implies, but also the immense emotional weight attached to it. Oh, the language, you ask? I have chosen to write in North American English of the Late Classical period, as being appropriate to the subject matter.
Do you need context? The assignment is to ride the Manhattan M5 bus route from its beginnings in SoHo, until its end at the George Washington bridge. These places are long gone, of course: the elaborate recording of this route by generations of ITP students has allowed for an accurate reconstruction of the experience (albeit at immense cost, in computational and archival resources).
The collective I am part of has allowed me direct control of the experience, and in my eagerness I arrive early at Holoubek Hall, the presence lab. The technicians still need some time to prepare – physical interfacing is still difficult, even after years of development. I feel prepared, however, having used the network to study the language and geography in the previous weeks. I pass the time by looking out the windows at the port below, where a ship from Madrid is being unloaded.
Finally, everything is ready, and I settle into the control face. The glass of nanomech-laced fluid is tasteless and warm (body temperature), and is swallowed quickly. There is a second of disorientation as the sensory bypasses take effect, and then, I am there:
New York City, a crisp fall day, 1,100 years ago and a universe away.
First impression: so many people! Almost all of them are monogender, and of physical types unknown to me. Each of the bodies I see, one mind. I experience a pang of sadness when I realize the extent of the diversity that has been lost, but avidly return to observing the scene around me.
The street seems to be under repair, a cluster of trucks are gathered around a cut in the pavement. I recall that this period was one of warfare and strife, and guess that perhaps the crews are trying to repair damage from a recent attack. The amount of scaffolding on nearby buildings at first seems to confirm this supposition, but closer inspection shows that the damage is quite clearly delimited, and that the work on buildings seems to be intentional, and not a result of hostile action. It seems that I am witnessing the workings of an ongoing maintenance process, relating to infrastructure that is not yet capable of self-repair. The trucks are labeled “Con-Edison”, which is a reference to one of the pioneers of electrical power distribution.
I am drawn along by the point of view of the long-ago documenter, and brought aboard the bus. The parallelism between the bus as a vehicle, and the way we choose to live now, is striking – and drives home to me the value of the experience. A group of us, all with approximately the same goal, give up short-term freedom of choice in return for increased efficiency.
I watch the streets of the vanished city go by, and am startled to see someone watching me: a ghostly face, floating inches away from the window. A moment of thought and things become clearer: the data on which my experience is based must originally have been recorded using an optical camera, so I must be seeing the recorded reflection of the person who made the original recording. For some reason, the archivists have chosen to leave it in.
It is young face, male, with a somber, almost sad expression, and it will be my companion for the next hour and a half. Across the ages, this student was set the same task I am about: to observe. I am fascinated by this solemn individual, and find myself speculating about him. What concerns shaped the world of an ITP student like him, so long ago? Did he have children? Did he spend his entire life as a single sex? Was he lonely, alone in his mind, with a body all to themselves? Did he survive the transition to our current state, through a combination of life extension and good luck? Was a network connection already as essential to life?
Outside on 6th Ave., street signs serve as a kind of external collective geographical memory. The open space of Houston Street gives way to a narrower road, and buildings become noticeably taller. They are labeled with their dates of construction: Bigelow Pharmacy 1838, Jefferson Market 1929, practically new structures, contemporary with the early years of ITP. Signs are used to communicate the nature of businesses, since at this time navigational tools are still in their infancy. I have to remind myself that none of the people I see around me have the same supplemental displays that I am using. I am struck by the vast amount of information that is fixed in place this way, tied to specific buildings and places. On the walls of some buildings, I see painted advertisements for businesses that had already ceased to exist. How did people distinguish between current and obsolete signage? Did they have no choice but to believe everything that was written?
I continue to be amazed by the sheer amounts of people in the street, practically all of them monoconscious. I can tell by the way their eyes are fixed in one direction, that their sensorium is only serving a single consciousness. This may be the central issue of the time: so many bodies, all of them needing places to live, food, means of transport.
They are served by many small businesses, of astonishingly specific types: different types of food, luggage, separate businesses selling shoes and repairing them, etc. At no time do I see more than 5 people in any of the shops, and often only the staff are there – a profligate waste of resources. A lot of the businesses just north of Houston are clearly concerned with pre-reproductive activities: clothing, food, alcohol.
Continuing north along 6th Ave., I notice how the streets slope down to the river on my left, reminding me of Manhattan’s topography, a granite spine rising between two rivers. Buildings are taller, and more elaborately decorated, mostly brick and sandstone. By 22nd Street, the amount of scaffolding, construction and maintenance activity is much reduced. Perhaps a wealthier area could already afford infrastructure capable of self-maintenance.
By 37th Street, buildings are even taller, materials are mainly glass and steel. I see the genesis of my world in these elevated structures, though the lack of bridges at the upper levels is somewhat perplexing. I know from my research that many of these structures survived until relatively recently, and the parts that remained above water were actually inhabited. As with our world, the driving force for such verticality in construction was scarcity of land. From my perspective at ground level, I can see that they are heavily reinforced and secured around their lower floors. Presumably, the armed guards are there to keep people at the street level from higher floors. In this part of town, security and power seem to be major concerns. In contrast, many of the buildings I saw further downtown actually seemed to encourage access – probably because of their focus on more social activities.
I attribute the cleanliness of the streets and the good state of most of the construction to substantially better infrastructure. This is probably paid for by the corporations in the area, some of which are still with us. Though people at this time may not have realized it, their government had already ceased to be relevant: so-called “public” infrastructure was already mostly bought and sold by “private” companies. (what an interesting contradiction in terms!)
By 57th Street, the monoliths are fewer. I see occasional clusters of small businesses and restaurants: dry cleaners, tobacco shops, snack bars. I smile when I see the “Rock ‘n’ Roll” deli., a cultural reference I am familiar with. So many shops, serving so many people, all of them with individual likes & dislikes!
The bus reaches Central Park, a clear frontier. Past this point, I see fewer people in the streets. Most of the people on the bus get off. The granite outcroppings on which Manhattan is built are finally visible, just inside the park. To my left, Middle-Eastern motifs decorate the entrance of the recently-renamed Jumeirah Essex House. It is ironic to see a building in Manhattan named after a beach in Dubai. The royal family must have had a sense of what was coming, and sought the high ground – but not high enough…
Just north of Columbus Circle, a huge new building is under construction. A truck loaded with pre-fabricated sections of stone flooring is unloading. I notice that this building is designed with security in mind – the lower floors have a bulk that implies heavy armoring. The older buildings at 67th Street and beyond seem less like fortresses. While the use of curved glass implies wealth, they do have windows at ground level. A few blocks further on, a row of mansions overlooking Riverside Park is a throwback to days when land scarcity was not quite so pressing. The bus is now traveling well above the river, along some bluffs. Perhaps it was this high ground that attracted settlement to this area in the first place.
At 112th Street, the density of construction declines markedly. Buildings are only 5 or 6 stories high, compared to the 15 floor structures common only a few blocks south. By this point, the bus is traveling along a high bluff, with the river visible on the left, and street level quite far down on the right. By 135th Street, we have entered an area of huge red brick high-rises and warehouses. Research suggests that, unlike the high rises further south, these buildings were mostly used for housing the poor, or for storage. Perhaps the imminent threat of flooding was not yet a factor?
I sense another adjustment in the automatic translation systems, and I am reading signs in Spanish. Clearly people are concerned about money here – shops advertise which methods of payment are valid, the availability of credit, the possibility of remitting funds to family in other places. Food shops and restaurants are very different from those I have seen before. A full-sized helicopter is embedded in the façade of what turns out to be a supermarket, owned by a José Liberato (“su destino, vender barato” – “his destiny, to sell cheaply”). Very eye-catching. People here seem concerned with their survival as individuals, and as a culture.
At 166th Street, the Columbia Medical Center is the center of a block of non-Hispanic culture. A few chain stores and cafes look like an outpost of West Side culture, but don’t last. By 175th Street the Hispanic community has reasserted itself. It is time to disembark. I know my time is limited, so I pay close attention as the simulation shifts its point-of-view to the beginning of the George Washington Bridge, where long ago someone came to admire the view. Had I grown up with a body to myself, I might find it frustrating to not be able to guide my steps, and instead have to rely on the movements of some long-ago videographer. My last image is of the bridge shining in the afternoon sun, rows and rows of trees visible across the river.
A shock of disorientation, and I am back in Holoubek Hall. It takes a moment to adjust to my surroundings, and to re-establish contact with the collective consciousness that occupies this body: 200 of us, organized as a cooperative.
When the seas rose, and the land ran out, and space turned out to be far more hostile than we thought, the only way out was to gather multiple minds into shared bodies, using formulas for management copied from the real estate world of the late pre-Flood period. As such, some of us share bodies as a condominium, some as collectives, some as totalitarian hierarchies where a single consciousness is able to physically express itself. Of course, all minds have their own network connection, which is where most of our living, working & playing takes place. Most of the time, we are passengers in the bodies that carry us, but this does not seem onerous, as long as we have our connection to the nets. My chance to control our shared body today is a rare privilege.
I am left with a sense of awe and astonishment, and understand the wisdom of this assignment: to get out into the physical world, to understand a life in motion, without the ever-present umbilical of the network. Alien as it may seem, that is the world inhabited by generations of students in this very program, some of the architects of the world we live in now.
