Substrate

Even if offices vanished entirely, that would only make room for new urban functions that would probably be more vital, further consolidating the city’s relevance.

Now we walk in straight lines because we have to, not because we know where we're going. Far from an expression of certainty, the urban street grid simplifies, removes choices, and reflect's nobody's direct route exactly. ​ We eagerly provide data about ourselves to platforms so they can help us learn what we want; our unique personal desires are mere inputs for systems that channel them into a narrower range of outputs.

Refactor Camp 2019, Day 1, Drew Austin: "The City as Weakly-Escaped Reality (Revisiting the Holey Plane)"

It is my hope that this will turn out to be a massive success and will lead to closure of other cross streets like 23rd, 34th, 42nd, 57th, 79th, 86th, and 96th.

but they are different from social privacy. Social privacy is the expectation that we shouldn’t want to pry into each others’ lives. ​ Defining social privacy in an online context is difficult because it’s not clear what our “public face” really is. Unlike our physical environment, our online world contains layers of our past, present, and future selves, all occupying the same timespace. We are all time travelers, navigating multiple realities at any given moment.

There are good mornings, goodnights, how y’all doings, and head nods and smiles and eye contact. There are neighbors who walk out on their front porch to give treats to my dog. There is polite chit-chat even if we don’t know each other. There are waves from car windows. There is communication. ​ That is where my money went. To rent, and to these women. I relied on all of them to keep me feeling safe, attractive, and emotionally healthy. I believed I could not have survived without them. And possibly I was right. ​ I was putting Band-Aids on myself for years. To survive life. I occasionally described myself as “good at New York.” I was able to maintain a life there. But that’s just it. I was only maintaining. ​ But that is what I left behind when I left New York, more than anything else. Eighteen years of building friendships. Those people are irreplaceable in my heart. I was waiting for a friend to join me, but I was content on my own, too. ​ She yelled to me, “Neighbor, come get in the picture, come on now.” She insisted on it. I did not know how to say no to her, and I did not want to. And so, I rose and joined them.

Instead of space, there are numbers representing flows, such as how long it takes to drive to work or the number of bars one’s cell phone gets at a certain location. Wormholes exist at every scale, from airports to freeway exits to the Redbox outside the supermarket, and determine a lot about life in these suburban environments, shortening distances between people, goods, and information and surreptitiously rearranging the city as well as the globe.

headphones reposition us each within our own unique reality.

“Places—individual stores, neighborhoods, and entire cities—are fragile, and the internet makes them more so.” “Marshall McLuhan wrote that every new medium contained another medium as its content: Speech, for example, became the content of writing, as writing became the content of print. Cities, which grew independently for so long, might now be the content of the internet.”

“I’m neither wise nor smart enough to answer the question Is Amazon good for Seattle? But the position of most non-Amazon tech companies in Seattle is that they’re thankful for Amazon’s presence, if for no other reason that they act as a lightning rod for all criticism of Seattle’s rapid upheaval.”

“Their dark windows serve as daytime mirrors for rich pedestrians”