Cyberpunk Now

Home.

Home was BAMA, the Sprawl, the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis

Program a map to display the frequency of data exchange, every thousand megabytes a single pixel on a very large screen. Manhattan and Atlanta burn solid white. Then they start to pulse. the rate of traffic threatening to overload your simulation. Your map is about to go nova. Cool it down. Up your scale. Each pixel a million megabytes. At a hundred million megabytes per second, you begin to make out certain blocks in midtown Manhattan, outlines of hundred-year-old industrial parks ringing the old core of Atlanta. . .

William Gibson, Neuromancer

I’ve always been fascinated by the concept of cities on a vast scale, whether they’re dense agglomerations of people in arcologies or unimaginably vast sprawls of apartments and skyscrapers. The ultimate outcome of such a concept is typified by the concept of the ecumenopolis or “world city.” Various sizes of concentrations of people on a larger scale than currently exists are part of the study of Ekistics, the study of all kinds of human settlements and how they develop.

As the human population increases, barring the colonization of space or a great die-off that reduces the population of Earth, the growth of larger cities and the increased blurring of lines between urban areas seems inevitable. Already, parts of the planet have great areas of very dense population, as shown in this demographic information (PDF). The densities of the cities of India, particularly Mumbai and Kolkata are amazing, but we shouldn’t overlook places like Kinshasa which are large and extremely dense cities.

The term information asymmetry is specifically applied to economics and represents the seller (or sometimes the buyer) having more information and, therefore, an advantage in a transaction. It’s an interesting extrapolation that relates to game theory and a bunch of cool stuff like that.

Interestingly, I think it applies in quite a few other situations. I’ve been reading quite a bit about China’s cyberwarfare planning (as explored in the paper “Like Adding Wings to the Tiger”) and asymmetric warfare (particularly guerrilla war in urban settings).

Similar concepts apply to chess as explored in the article, “Chess! What is it good for?” Interestingly, this article suggests tempo is the key to winning battles. Some theorists I’ve read say that adequate intelligence is necessary, such as being able to read an opponent at the individual level, in order to set and maintain the right tempo. In many cases, tempo depends on coordinating quite a few things at once, making for a very information-dense environment, so the ability to collect information and effectively filter it are key to maintaining that tempo.

Are we still headed for the dystopian crash that’s been predicted for decades?  Or will the future be even stranger and darker than we can imagine.  This is my take on some of the few trends and possibilities based on recent developments.