Geography Is New Writing Of The Earth
February 25th, 2010 | Published in Historica Obscura, Images, Rhizomes
Seeing the world differently gets me all hot and bothered, so I was proper “psyched” when I read “Above the Past” in the New York Times and learned about NYCityMap, a Google Maps-esque wonder-function for seeing what New York City looked like, from overhead, in 2008, 2006, or 1924 (click the camera icon). It surprises me how similar the older City is to the city of today. Still, the site is worth some serious minutes of sepia-tone playing around.
Likewise, Phantom City takes the whole “seeing the familiar urban blahscape with new eyes” in the other direction, allowing users to imagine a New York of the near future. The phantom of possibility—a multiple ghost, mutating with each Apple press conference and MTA fail—courses unobserved beneath each skyscraper, each yard of pizza-spattered concrete.
It’s an appealing thesis. I read Warren Ellis and William Gibson and listen to Chromeo and watched Firefly and Bionic Six. I want a flying vespa inside a flying car, an Aibo that can floss my teeth for me… And yet I know these things will not be mine…
Both sites finally present not images of the past or future, but of alternate presents. 1924 is, relatively speaking, yesterday, less than the first twitch of a cosmic blink. And tomorrow approaches faster the more time we spend writing about it and trying to codify. We sometimes focus on far-off mirage-goals (nanorobots, peace, Aibo that can floss our teeths for us) while failing to take in the changes, more massive, brought on by the hyperwebnetz.
Where geography once took dumb European peasants in search of mangos and delicious syphilis during the Enlightenment, some new, hideous geography now takes America’s adventurers—not farther afield, to vast floating cities full of jaguar-gods and the beautiful Christ-less Passion of the potlatch, but inside, to the brains of the new anonymous ur-person, the mirrored hive-mind that circumscribes whatever future we elect.
Old geography presents the world as apprehendable as illustration, reduction, miniaturizaiton, visualization; new geography reduces an unpresentable pleroma-world of possibilities (194,000 results for “spondulix”) to a few hyperlinks, each of which concatenates to a few more; to a few more; to over 9000; to nigh-infinities, indexed and flattened by reduction (geography) to a few hyperlinks… It’s a fugue, and it’s a new way of moving through time and space, and, hey, we’re all incredibly used to it, half a generation in…
