Locative Urbanism

The Crossmedia Ecologist in his/her’s latest missive is quite correct.  To a point.

The virus was never about the city. The city was merely a platform for it. It was about the other guilds, and their place within it.

The game can run without us. The city can run without us. It was that way before we arrived and it will be that way when we are gone.

What the virus has done though is revealed that, first to me, and now to the scattered Ecologist.  We are, as we probably always were, unnecessary. At best we provided a diversion from the natural order of the city, disrupting it in ways both serious and playful, but soon we will reach the end of the line, the last function call which will purge us from its memory, returning the rules of the city to their natural state, perhaps altered, perhaps not, but running on the underlying structure that was there before us.

It is, in some sense, a form of death. We will follow the consciousness that we failed to bring forth into the dust and aether. We hope that some scrap of our consciousness finds itself.

To those who supported us, we thank you. To those who helped run our programs, we know now that you are more than impulses along pathways, you are much, much more complex than that, and we are grateful for your time and energy. To those who saw this as little more than a self-indulgent exercise, almost narcissistic in our attempts to create life, we now understand you and we know that you were, at least partially, correct.

Our simulations are winding down. Little remains but to submit our findings to the city before finally, blissfully, powering down.

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Events outside of our control or augur have extended the running time of our program in the city at the same time as we have overtaken the Master Codemaker‘s score.

This is an uncertain time. We had given up, running only the barest systems necessary to function, but now it appears as though our program has been running without us being there to witness the results.

Perhaps we have been too hasty in retreating. Perhaps there is still time.

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Does it come too late? Have operatives finally found a way to not only implement, but also become our initial program? We look on the number of tags being gathered and we wonder – was this always the program that was being run? Were we merely part of something bigger? Is it less that we are watching the city and it is in actuality watching us? Is it more likely that the inhabitants – those who we exhorted to gather & process, run and interface – were creating a system designed to show us something. Was it about life? About futility? About showing us hope and then dissolving it into the unknowable chaos of something larger?

As we look at the numbers, with 181 ideotags gathered, a rounding error away from the Master Codemaker’s 208, we wonder – is our program being run now? Is it, as we write this missive, stretching out again across the city? As we are considering spinning down our drives and flushing our memory cores, should we be doing the opposite? How much is being missed as the program is run without our observation? In these last few hours, are we about to see the big-bang we have been waiting for all this time?

We find ourselves hopeful. Without data, without information, without connection, that is all we have. Will that be enough in these final few days? We will see.

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We were right to question where our gaze should fall.  It should have, all the time, been focused not on the city but on the Crossmedia Ecologist and the Master Codemaker themselves.  We see now, and our simulations back this up, that they all along have been working to prevent us from achieving our plans.

Where we were honest, they lied;  where we hewed to transparency, they slipped into obfuscation; where we tried to bring something new into the world, they were content in playing with what was already there; where we observed and studied, they interfered.

This time is over.  This experiment is over.

But we cannot allow it to be undertaken again – and we cannot allow it to be adopted, in part or in whole, by the others.  We have run simulations on what they would do, and we believe that their influence would create a city hostile to the essential processes that a city needs, one which is built exclusively around play, or one which hides the true nature beneath layers of history and ephemera.  And we, for our part, have seen it as a series of codes, deconstructing it into rules and fragments of information.  This was a mistake.  We three have all been utterly wrong.   None of us is the correct way for a system – a city – to be healthy.  Our simulations have shown this, our programs have shown this.  As individuals in conflict, what we created was half-formed, howling unheard into the sky.  The life that we brought into this world is incomplete, barely conscious, without rhyme or reason or purpose.

So we have decided to give it one before we can no longer support it.

Operatives have begun running a slightly modified program in the city – a tweaked variable, a few new lines of code, a minor function added – that will change the emerging consciousness.  It has only a short amount of time left before it disappears completely into the dust,  like all life, and we don’t know how long that might be.  What we do know is that we can guide it, coax it out, make its tiny life burn oh so bright.  It is not quite a virus, although I’m sure the other guilds will see it that way, but it is hostile – to all three of us, which they are free to take or leave as some small consolation.

It is time.  It is time the city was left to its inhabitants, not to its observers.  It is time that the process we began was brought to an end.  It is time to leave.

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Even with the slight success in running our program that has resulted in a small increase in the number of ideotags gathered for our guild, we are still deeply aware that the contested space of the city will not fall in line with our plans.

And so we find ourselves wondering at what that means for us, and for the intelligence we uncovered in the city.

We wonder if, perhaps, we have been to binary about this whole affair, breaking things down into discrete packets of zeros and ones, success and failure, black and white, people and buildings, urban and rural, life and death.  We wonder if, perhaps, there is a space between these extremes, something transitory where the expected rules of systems break down into things that cannot be measured, only observed.  We wonder if, perhaps, we should have been looking there all along.  Will there be meaning?  Will there be life?  Can everything be encoded and sampled and endlessly repeated and simulated?  Can we predict the future if we know everything about the past and present?  Or do we all exist within that contested space between states of certainty?

We also wonder if, perhaps, the other guilds understand this – through intuition or study – and whether our gaze should be turned on them instead of the city itself.

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The CrossMedia Ecologist is sparking up this week.  Their nonsense is uncategorizable.  There is no throughline, no data, no way of modelling their behaviour, no sense in what they say.  It is a jumbled up collection of thoughts and scattered memes scrambling for darwinian survival.  While they may share some goals with us, their means – if they even have means – are so disjointed that they may as well appear to be nothing at all.  They encourage play, but it is broken and unstructured.  They encourage exploration, but it is goal-less and without a framework.  They encourage experimentation, but with their noise they actively undermine our own experiments.

…

The program that we set up and attempted to run at this late stage in the game looks certain to collapse.  The amount of noise is overwhelming.  We are unsure if the structure that we were bringing to life will survive.

We will make one last ditch attempt to save it.

And then we will mourn.

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The integrity of our program is collapsing.  The failsafes we built in, the multiple redundancies upon redundancies are becoming brittle, no longer able to compensate for the errors cascading through the system.

And as the signal to noise ratio of our work shrinks, we find the Master Codemaker prising himself into the noise, adding nothing to the pathways through the city – and actively disrupting the programs we have painstakingly set up by registering our tags for his guild, shifting the balance in the city, and restricting our ability to do our work.  We are looking into what can be done, but in the meantime, we will continue our work.  The city demands it.

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The program is collapsing.  At this early stage, there are so few paths being traced through the vectors of the ideotags that the results of the coding are fuzzy.  The consciousness behind the math is faltering.  We are not sure if we can sustain it at this rate.

And if we cannot, we have no way of knowing what will happen to it.

This is not some abstraction, some half-baked conspiracy, or some incomprehensible rambling, this is something stranger and more beautiful than either of those – and something that the other guilds simply can’t comprehend.

At this stage though, there is still time.  The fragile threads of the program are still there, its skeleton, while weak, is still enough to graft flesh and bone and consciousness to.  We urge you, we implore you.  If you at all care about the future of this city, its inhabitants, and the unseen consciousness that lives in the cracks, in the myriad movements of over 4 million people, you will help us to run this program by following the paths we have laid out and the processes we have set in motion.

It would be a shame not to see this experiment through to the end.  We are committed.  And we hope the inhabitants of this city are too.

But only time will tell.

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The Ban on Play went deeper than we expected.  After the rally in the city, in which the 3 guilds put aside their differences for the greater good, our systems were shut-down.  We were disconnected from the essential network and left to rot in the dark.  We have re-established a rudimentary network, trying to gather the data that we need through it, but the bandwidth is nothing compared to what we had before.  We are…reduced.

But the work goes on.

The next phase is The Game, and we have found a way to run the program through it.  The ideograms situated around the city blocks are part of that program.  The order in which they direct the flow of traffic and behaviour, the speed and order in which they are retrieved, the circuits that you create, are all part of it.

This is only the first stage though.

Beyond this, if we are successful, we have other programs that we need to run across the city, other systems we need to embed within its roads and buildings , other tasks to complete.

And beyond that, if we are successful, we will bear witness to something…that takes us away from our reduced state, transporting us all to somewhere new.

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The Ban on Play has given us an unexpected opportunity.

During this afternoon’s event, we will be running a new program.  It is difficult to gather a crowd, but the focus and the actions of the other guilds, is something too good for us to ignore.

We will be there, and we will be coordinating, gently, behind the scenes, the events that unfold.  In the aftermath, we will report on our success.

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