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)"

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.”