As I write these words I am sitting in the living room. Technically, it’s a porch but the easy chair, glass of afternoon beer, and somewhat stable net signal make it feel like more of a living room than the actual living room which consists of a TV too old for words and the folded mattress where I’ve been sleeping.

Technically, the porch is outside and the living room is inside, but these kinds of distinctions become academic in a situation where all doors and windows are kept as far open as they can possibly be in the hopes of promoting a cross breeze all day and all night. The porch/living room, kitchen, and living room/bedroom may as well all be pavilions in a gazebo. Only my hosts’ bedrooms are ever really sealed and only when they’ve got overnight guests. (Not that it matters, the walls are old and thin.)

photo credit: Idiolector

Some kind of mysterious transaction just went down in the back alley. I’m not supposed to have noticed it, says Aton. Best not to notice anything around here. But it was broad daylight and how could I not hear the low growl of the engine? It sounded like a gas engine, a real guzzler. Could have been a roadtone, I know, but it sounded genuine to me. I think I even saw smoke.

Last night, we went down by the canal and lit a bonfire. It was pretty nice, though I found it hard to get into at first – too nervous about cops showing up. Samantha laughed at me, said that there was nothing to worry about. Showed me how you can rewire a temp-permit and fix the dates with the right kind of data-paste. She says people leave expired permits all over. I didn’t ask where she got the paste.

In the end it didn’t matter. No one showed up aside from more friends and friends of friends. Late into the night a group split off to go to a place called something like WARHOGS or whatever, Samantha left but I decided to stay behind. Lay in the grass with a few of the quieter folk, trying to spy stars through the clouds. Had a long inchoate debate about whether the clouds or stars were moving and if it was the stars, were they really satellites or one of the stations? I tried holding my finger still as a reference but by that point everything was too wobbly to really achieve much in the way of scientific accuracy.

I wandered home in a pleasant haze.

Did I tell you? They’ve got real records here. Like antique ones, not the cheap retro ones that you can get in any old onDemand outlet. Aton says that the old ones sounds better, even though they can’t hold as many songs. They’ve got more character, he says. They last longer. I asked about their carcindex, but he just laughed. There’s a lot of really great stuff here. Bands I’d never heard of. I’ve taken some pictures and I’ll try to assemble a collection for you sometime this week.

This morning, Sam took me up on the roof to see the stills. It’s an astounding network of tubes and tubs. I tried to follow the line from rain collectors, through to the casks on the other end. I kept getting lost in the tangle. Sam says that if I stick around long enough, she’ll show me the ropes (pipes).

Pretty much everything involved comes from the rain (don’t worry, Sam made to point out their quadruple filtration and reverse osmosis system) or the freedom garden which is run by a New Organist collective just up the street. They supply the supplies and Sam supplies the resulting booze.

They’re completely illegal of course and the patchwork of tarps and scrap material can’t possibly be hiding them from Constellation. Sam says that out here we’re barely worth bothering about so they just don’t. Aton muttered something about a million eyed-god being blind.

photo credit: Dom Dada

We talked a little about tactics last night. Aton says that the privacy war is over and that the people lost. He says that our only real remaining resort is to inefficiency. It’s like when those guys flew those planes into America. Apparently, the echelons of power already knew it was coming but they knew so much other stuff as well that the information just got drowned out on the way to a decision getting made.

Aton says that when you get pick-pocketed, they get away with it because they put pressure somewhere else on your body at the same time, so you are too busy feeling the one thing to notice the other. He says the only path to freedom is to put so much pressure on the system all over the place, that it can’t notice anything at all.

Apparently there was an old philosopher who hated the government too, who used to say “starve the beast” but Aton says that’s all passed now. You could cut half the surveillance feeds at the swipe of a pen (as if!) and we’d still have more than enough information being fed into the echelon – it wouldn’t impact things at all. So he and Sam are taking the opposite approach.

We’re going out tonight, with bags and bags of sensors and cameras that we’re going to set up and donate to the public feeds. Some of these devices are faulty in all sorts of really interesting ways. We’re going to put them up all over the place, in the least interesting places possible. We’re going to do this for weeks and weeks, just adding more and more mud to the stream.

I also heard Sam say something to Aton about the Russians renting some time on one of their botnets. I think the plan is to put those spam engines to emancipatory use, replacing sex ads with Home Sec keywords. I heard a rumour that their analysis engines are already months behind in processing. They’ll stay that way so long as we can keep the heat on to deny them future budget expansions (all the more reason to ask our brothers and sisters in the capital to redouble their lobbying efforts).

I don’t know if it’ll amount to much in the end, but it seems like the only path we’ve got left.

“Drown the beast.”

Ada

photo credit: urban_data

Mine goes a little something like this:

“It’s cultural hedging,” said my guide, as we picked our way through the parking lot, “Think about survivalists in Y2K. If everything had ended, they’d have been equipped to thrive. It didn’t, so they lost out.”

“It still seems like a bad decision,” I said, pausing to aim my photo rig, “The collapse of America is hardly imminent.”

The viewfinder showed nameless meat hung to cure along a guardrail, framed by skyscraper shadows and spotlight by the setting sun. I was fiddling with the focus when someone racked a shotgun.

“This ain’t America,” said the bandit, “This is Detroit.”

He bought the wine at auction. Included, was a certificate of authenticity showing the bottle’s lineage traced backward from auction house to warehouse to boathouse. Before that, the ocean floor. It had lain there for decades, wedged in the doomed ship’s hold.

He opened the wine at home. The bottle had aged gracefully, he decided. He admired the worn label and salt-textured glass. The cork was decisively intact. People had been dancing on deck when the torpedo hit.

He drank the wine alone. Exquisite. The last of his fortune was spent tracking down Löwenbräu from the Hindenburg.

The more observant among you might realize that the idea is shamelessly stolen from this fantastic Edible Geography post.

Are there any botnets that come from either public or private sectors?
“This is our public-sector botnet.” Boy, I’d like to see one of those.

Bruce Sterling in More Cyberwar Semantics at Beyond the Beyond

photo credit: Beverly & Pack

After years of rumoured increases in the number and sophistication of attacks on the nation’s public and private networked infrastructure, groups claiming to be from North Korea declare all out cyberwar. The U.S. government realizes that it needs its own, bigger, botnet to strike back. Rather than risk secure military computers, to say nothing of the hardware procurement and deployment time, the innovative Cyber Home Defence Initiative is announced.

Combining elements of Conficker, Folding@Home, and old fashioned American wartime patriotic spirit, the CHDI allows allows ordinary citizens to do their part by dedicating spare cycles and bandwidth to protecting the networked home front and striking back at America’s enemies. A quick download and completely automatic installation makes contributing to the defence effort as easy as leaving you computer on and online when it’s not in use.

Whichever political party isn’t in power decries the CHDI as yet another infringement on American liberties, a governmental land grab, and a violation of privacy in hearth and home. The other side leverages their extensive social networking capabilities to build support for, and sign-ups to, the initiative. Department of Defence officials decline to comment on rumours that Blackwater’s cyber security division is renting time on the Nucrypt botnet.

He grinned, “Wouldn’t have worked years ago, you were still seeing Maria and I had some things to work out for myself.”

She propped herself up on her elbows, “Still, I can’t help but think about all that wasted time!”

photo credit: SnaPsi Сталкер

He laughed, “Not wasted at all! In order for things to work out this way, that time needed to pass.”

She traced the line from his ear to his chin, “You make it sound like you had a master plan.”

He smiled back, “I still do! It’s a twenty year plan. This is year seven.”

She kissed him on the cheek, “Ah, but now you’ve ruined you plan by revealing it to me!”

He raised an eyebrow, “Have I? You aren’t even going to take this seriously. I can continue with my plan as if nothing happened.”

Her eyes lit up and she began to laugh.

“See? Even now,” he said, “Even now as I tell you that I predicted that you would laugh when I told you about the plan, you’re laughing.”

She was still laughing.

“Even now, you aren’t taking me seriously. I can flat out admit that I have worked out a twenty year plan for the two of us and it won’t matter because there’s no way you’ll believe me.”

She kept laughing. He smiled and pretended to laugh along. Of course she wouldn’t take him seriously. She couldn’t know.

He knew.

photo credit: Steve Wampler

Christine didn’t notice right away. She had her headphones on and so could not register the sudden silence. She did notice that the taps weren’t working but assumed that this was due to a problem with the plumbing. She was wearing her watch, so it continued to run, so, when she checked it, she (wrongly) believed that she was late for work. She noticed that the door did not swing shut behind her, but assumed that this was because it was stuck. She was a little surprised that it closed easily when she pulled at it. She did notice Mr. Thomson at his door, but he was old and slow anyway, so she did not realize that he was frozen in place as she hurried past on her way to the elevator. She did notice that the elevator was broken but assumed mechanical failure. She did not notice the door failing to close behind her as she took the emergency stairs two at a time. Nor did she acknowledge the security guard frozen at his station on the main floor.

She couldn’t help but notice the traffic.

Three lanes in each direction, completely frozen in space. Cars and busses, SUVs, some enormous trucks and, in the far lane, a VW Microbus covered in psychedelic graffiti. Commuters, most of them. The Microbus contained a 60s revival band, though Christine did not know this. There was a bike lane, too. Not far to her right was a cyclist, bent over his handlebars, intent on the road, wearing Lance Armstrong Yellow. The word ’statuesque’ drifted through her mind.

She approached him carefully. He was wearing a helmet but no sunglasses so she could see that his eyes were intensely blue. He looked like a VR photograph. She thought about The Matrix. She thought about the Holodeck on Star Trek.

“Computer, resume program,” she said. Nothing happened.

She walked around the cyclist once. He was wearing typical biking clothing – he wasn’t a commuter. She wondered if he was a courier. He had one of those bags, but so did all of her friends and they weren’t couriers. She stopped in front and stared into his eyes. They were focused on something beyond her, probably the next intersection. She leaned in for a closer look.

And he slammed into her. More to the point, his bike did. They collapsed together in a tangle of spokes and frame and limbs and chain. It hurt a lot and it took both of them a moment to regain their breath. She had already picked herself up by the time he’d begun to speak. He looked furious so she started to back away.

“What th-” he said. Then he was frozen.

Christine was puzzled. She was beginning to understand that Something Serious was happening. She stepped toward the cyclist.

“-e fu-” he continued and Christine was so startled that she jumped back and he was frozen again. She circled around behind him and moved in close.

“-ck!” he finished. And stopped because, from his point of view, she’d disappeared.

“Boo!” she said. So he hopped away from her, tripping on his bike and flailing forward.

She left him there, frozen in mid-fall, his arms sprawled and his face aimed toward the sprockets. After a moment’s consideration, she pulled the bike away, holding on to the far end, thinking that it would be better to land on tarmack than on pointy metal bits.

She found a bench and sat down to consider her next move. There was no question now that Something Was Up. Deciding on a course of action was paramount. Her ears felt hot, so she took her headphones off. It was at this point that the silence registered.

The silence was deafening. Consider that she’d lived in her apartment for three years. Consider that, for three years, every morning she’d come out the front door to the roar of traffic. Consider that under the roar of traffic was the sound of conversations and radios. Under the conversations and radios was the patter of feet. Under the footsteps was the whistling of the wind between skyscrapers. Under the wind was the hum of electric wires and neon lights. Under the hum was the low rumble of subways and the burbling of the sewers. Under the subways and sewers was the distant sound of waves lapping on the lakeshore. And there were doors slamming and rats nibbling and birds flapping and calling and bugs buzzing and windows sliding and stomachs rumbling and papers folding and fans whirring and dust falling. Now none of that was happening.

Christine fought down panic and crammed her headphones back on. She fast-forwarded to her favourite track, closed her eyes and tried to pretend that none of this wasn’t happening. It didn’t work. There was a discarded coffee cup near her hand. She crumpled it up and hurled it toward the frozen traffic. It made it about four feet and then stopped, suspended in mid air.

The phrase ‘personal time field’ drifted through her mind. She thought about the letters.

They’d started arriving two years before. The author claimed to be her father. She’d never met her father, nor had she met the author. They were meticulously handwritten. Precise to the point where she’d wondered if they were computer printed, but they weren’t – Erin had shown her the pen strokes. Christine had shown all of the letters to Erin one evening, partly to get her opinion and partly to amuse her. The contents were crazy. Barely restrained rants about the scientific establishment, carefully worded comments about Christine’s mother, vague sweeping generalizations about time travel, quantum physics, south american mysticism, and strange sketched diagrams. Erin’s favourite part had been the diagrams.

They arrived every two months, like clockwork. The latest had arrived the night before and it had contained what the author referred to as: ‘The Talisman’. It had contained The Talisman and instructions to wear it today. She remembered the letter saying that it would provide her with a personal time field. She’d laughed and filed the letter away with the rest – she enjoyed them, though she did not believe them. She’d worn the talisman anyway, not because of any belief in the letters but because it matched her top and made a funny story.

She grabbed hold of the talisman and examined it. It was the same nice orange that contrasted with her olive tank top, though she could not tell if it was a trick of the light or memory that it seemed to sparkle more than when she’d put it on after coming out of the shower. She reached behind her neck and began to undo the clasp.ITt was the only way to be sure that the letters weren’t real.

She found herself unwilling to take the risk.

Drone Army descends on New Orleans

Contact with drones lost during drug wars, swarm slowly migrating north.

photo credit: l@mie

MERAUX, La. – A swarm of drones, known as the “Lost Army,” appear to have established themselves in the New Orleans area, the defence commissioner said. The autonomous force has been operating without human control for nearly a decade.

Three units were spotted by junkyard workers, about 10 miles from where the reconnaissance units were discovered in November, commissioner Baako Arceneaux said Wednesday.

Though the exact nature of the drones remains unconfirmed, goggle imagery provided by the workers matches the profile of constructor-type units.

This most recent sighting was close enough to last year’s location that the drones could have been part of the main swarm. But they might also have been blown ashore by hurricane Quinton or Stephanie, said Arceneaux in a news release.

“Although the full extent of the so-called Lost Army’s presence isn’t known, we have to assume that at least a portion is established in the area and people should be careful when travelling outside, hunting recreationally, or otherwise behaving in what could be perceived as an aggressive manner,” Arceneaux said.

Since the Michoacán incident, the Louisiana Department of Civil Defence has been upgrading surveillance stations along a north-south line through the state and at several key navigational choke-points to monitor for signs of the drones. Critics charge that the process has taken too long and that warnings are coming too late.

“This is just part of a larger failure on the part of the powers-that-be to properly fund national sanctity,” said Corporal J. F. Ruck, Minutemen spokesman, “They’re telling us to just sit back and let the drones fly on by, more of the extensive record of do-nothing politics by the government. We don’t even know where they are.”

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Built and deployed to police the Columbian jungle during the height of anti-drug paranoia, contact with the nearly completely autonomous collective was lost 9 years ago. The incident and subsequent massacre of a small unit of Panamanian security forces led to the immediate banning of high-autonomy drone units. The ban has ironically made the errant drones nearly impossible to contain.

“The problem is that our guys just aren’t as fast as these things,” said General Hussein, speaking from the Pentagon, “They do one thing really well and that is high speed 720 degree combat. You can’t expect a human operator to match that capability.”

After two disastrous attempts to retrieve or destroy the drones in South America, a containment policy was declared. However, jurisdictional issues have plagued the joint task force and as much as 50% of the army carrying up to 70% of the remaining ordinance remains unaccounted for. Despite efforts, they have been steadily migrating northward.

According to Lockheed Martin analysts, the drones appear to be in a patrol mode. Since the massacre at the alleged cartel fields in Michoacán, few violent incidents have been reported.

The drones carry a mixture of bio-explosive and conventional ordinance. Experts recommend that anyone confronted with drones disarm and seek cover immediately. People with weapons, home-based laboratories or certain kinds of farms are advised to take special caution. More information is available on the DoCD website.

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Here’s the deal: It seems like all of the buzz for augmented reality is around layering images in real time over the world or a video feed of the world. That seems cool, but it’s all very new and pre-alpha and I feel like there has to be more to the AR stuff than just jittery lines and awkward French maids. In fact, I think that there is the tech for an app, RIGHT NOW that could provide a polished user experience using current-gen consumer devices. I’d like to pitch that product to you today. Now.

photo credit: babel`µx

Here’s the background: On day 10 of Dustin Curtis’ 30 Day Flight he sits next to a retired Disney audio Imagineer. Calls him Mr Q. They have a conversation. In 1968 this Q guy designed the ambient audio system for Disney World. It was the first theme park that had music playing on the pathways between the rides. Over time it’s gotten more and more sophisticated.

Listen to this:

He describes how he wrote some software for “manufacturing emotion” with the thousands of new speakers in the park. The system he built can slowly change the style of the music across a distance without the visitor noticing. As a person walks from Tomorrowland to Fantasyland, for example, each of the hundreds of speakers slowly fades in different melodies at different frequencies so that at any point you can stop and enjoy a fully accurate piece of music, but by the time you walk 400 feet, the entire song has changed and no one has noticed.

That’s Dustin Curtis explaining How Mr Q Manufactured Emotion

It’s a cool solution but it’s very 20th Century. Very infrastructural. It’s location dependent and expensive to reproduce. It asks everyone to hear the same thing. It doesn’t scale to the whole world.

Enter smart phones.

Jer, you know smart phones. Smart phones are your own private amusement park. They have headphone jacks, they let us load apps, they let us play sounds, they are location aware. We don’t need to install speakers throughout the city, people carry the speakers in their pockets. They’re listening to playlists and podcasts and these really ancient “we-don’t-know-from-new-tech-so-we’re-just-filming-plays” primitive stuff. Pre-modern stuff. Audio walking tours? Please, that’s Walkman stuff. Press play when you reach this sign post, whatever. We can reproduce Mr Q’s tech and we don’t need to lay a single inch of cable, don’t need to bolt in a single sub-woofer. We just need to paint in the sounds.

Pick an launch market. Somewhere filled to the gills with creative types who have iPhones, Palms Pre, and Android handsets. New York? Toronto? London? San Francisco? Call up some big names or some up and comings soundscape artists. Is Brian Eno available? What about DJ Someone-I’ve-Never-Heard-Of? Someone the kids are in to.

There’s two parts to this thing. The client sits on the phone, downloads a soundtrack – custom for the city – pulls from the location API, and mixes sounds according to the instructions. There’s cleverness sure, some audio gee-whizery secret sauce, all very patentable and proprietary that seamlessly pulls it together. As you make your way from uptown to downtown, the tone shifts gradually, like in Mr Q’s park but moreso. Mr Q is strictly last century, he’s amateur hour hacker hobbyist. It’s laying copper when we could be putting up cell towers in Africa. Disney doesn’t know from happiest place on earth.

On the server – wait’ll to see what we’ve got going there – it’s all very user-friendly, very drag-n-drop. We show you a map of the city and your uploaded audio files. You can paint-in areas, just like Photoshop, in fact we’re using one of those 2.0 cloud-based painting apps as a base tool. Colour your regions and associate sounds accordingly. We crowdsourced the names of neighbourhoods from Flickr to give you suggested outlines, if you just wanna throw something together, but the real artist can paint down to the nearest half-meter.

Oh yeah, of course it’s all socially networked. We’ve got Facebook integration and a Twitter feed and you can rate soundtracks and see what your friends are listening to and we’ll make a recommendation engine or just leverage someone else’s.

Financial model? We’ve got a financial model like you wouldn’t believe. Licensing opportunities for bands, official city soundtracks for the burgs that care about that kind of thing, pay-per listen, downloadable in-app micro transactions, the whole thing. Disney needs to talk to US. Why are they wasting time on a single soundtrack for the happiest place on earth? Why aren’t they selling Little Mermaid downloads for the girls and Pirates of the Caribbean for the boys? You know what I’m getting at: everyone’s happiest place custom-selected for the needs of the individual.

And that’s all 1.0 stuff. Pre-launch Beta. Let me tell you about what’s in the pipeline.

For one thing, imagine interactive soundtracks. We’ll throw up some time-of-day code in the 1.2 release, that’s easy stuff. Then we start pulling down weather data and incorporating that into the premium soundtracks. Maybe event-based too. Festival in progress? Why not throw in a caribbean undertone?

In the long run, as user adoption upticks, we see a sub-genre of tracks that react to what other users are up to. Who is nearby? Is a crowd forming? The app knows and revises the soundscape accordingly. We’re also looking at a game element – can you follow audio clues and visit all the right locations? Secret soundtracks, unlockable content, all the stuff that makes people crazy with desire.

That’s not it, there’s 3.0 plans too, stuff that’ll change your relationship with sound; military applications, fitness regimens all kinds of things. But before I get to that, you’re gonna need to sign the NDA.

1. 15 Lombard Street is a meticulously researched manual for breaking into a London bank. Read about it on BLDGBLOG.
2. Augmented Reality. Hip and sexy new tech. Lots of active development and gee-whizzery. The whole industry is still essentially pre-alpha.
3. The construction method in Bruce Sterling’s Distraction. Tagged tools, materials, and smart gloves tell unskilled workers what to do. The building more or less assembles itself.
4. WikiHow and Instructables.
5. The Anarchist Cookbook.

photo credit: Curious Expeditions

Recipe

What’s missing from AR is good, cheap, goggles. No one wants to go around with a flashlight on a lanyard Everyone knows this. The solution is under active development. It’s a matter of time before goggles let us overlay images on the world in real time, leaving our hands free to, you know, work.

The promise of AR (aside from sexy maids everywhere you look) is highly contextual just-in-time information. Could be automated, could be an operator looking over your shoulder telling you what to do.

“OK, pull the lever I just highlighted in red, then the one that I highlighted green.”

The idea of puppet-master is so centralized. So 19th-Century Crime. The real future is in the automated stuff. What happens when someone makes a Heist Layar? What happens when the getaway portion of the Heist Layar is build on top of someone else’s Traffic Avoider routines?

Distributed, crowd-sourced manuals for a break-in and escape. Researched by shadowy groups with Cayman Island bank accounts, released to the street. Hey mister meth-addict who just pulled off the greatest heist of the century, despite having no plan whatsoever: Need somewhere to launder your money? The manual has some ideas about what accounts you could use (for a fee).

It’s all very user-friendly. You pop on the goggles, plug in the earphones and go to work. There is a bright pathway lighting your way along with a little countdown telling you how long you have to get to the next node. The manual assures you that the patrol times have been precisely plotted. It ducks you into and out of shadows with alarming precision. Red areas outline the vision cones of every known security camera. You can see the gaps and thread your way between them effortlessly. You are wearing the clothes that the manual had you put on and a working counterfeit ID tag (the gear guided you through making that too). There are countermeasures in place, of course, but you’re running a 0-day version, updated overnight with data from an inside source.

You accomplices don’t even need to be witting. Inject the right instructions into other people’s rigs, have them hold open doors or block traffic to ease the getaway. You can recruit accomplices on Craigslist. Spread a crime across a wide enough range of people and the notion of accessory begins to look strangely outmoded.

“What? I’m just a courier. I got handed a package and I handed it off at the appropriate time. Of course my papers are all in order.”

“Surveillance of the bank? What are you talking about?! I was hired by a company to ensure that their security guards were all making their rounds at the appointed time and to note any deviations.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about officer, I just answered an ad and did what the rig told me. I thought it was a cleaning job.”

Now, take this tech and give it to suicide bombers.

photo credit: mallix

It was no great surprise when the highways seceded.

A decade of inadequate funding, a Federal system collapsed in all but name, and a growing trend towards autonomy by the megacities left a vacuum in transportation policy that demanded to be filled. Public funding gave way to tolls which gave way to privatization which gave way to a network of roadways with little loyalty to the faded Union and a vested interest in maintaining the exclusive safety of their limited territories.

…

The seeds of the secession were sewn in, of all places, Afghanistan. Amongst the unconquerable mountains was waged an eternal game of cat and mouse. Pitting patrols against insurgents and drones against IEDs, the military demonstrated that even if you couldn’t control the territory, you could keep the roads clear. Much as with flack-jackets and APCs, it was a matter of time before drone hardware trickled down into law enforcement and private security.

…

In the past, borders had been fixed to natural geographic or political points. If they weren’t cut along a mountain range or a coastline, they were drawn along the arbitrary geometric divisions of longitude and latitude. These conveniences for cartographers and generals were 20th century relics.

Automated smart-defences changed the rules. Borders of arbitrary complexity became possible, as demonstrated by the almost fractal Jerusalem Solution. The new question became whether a territory was worth defending. For the Freeway States, the calculation shifted to tolls, traffic levels, and ROI per mile.

…

There were missteps on the road to independence. The I87’s disastrous “We need to secede to succeed” campaign springs immediately to mind.

…

But try as they might to ease the process, borders always cause friction, reducing traffic and further starving road-side communities of income and tourism. A trend evident in the increasing destitution of the “drive-thru states”.

…

To attempt to draw a political map of the reconstituted North America is to confront these contradictions head-on. What counts as a nation? How to capture the overlapping spheres of responsibility? What about the areas all but abandoned to wilderness? Does membership confer citizen-hood?

…

Here, in what used to be Arizona, the new owners of I40 are experimenting with a new security model. In a stretch of route that has been notoriously difficult to keep profitably clear, tolls vary inversely with the recency of patrols.

The idea is simple: Display the time of the latest sweep prominently and offer a discount as the safety rating goes stale.

“It’s a way to give drivers the choice,” explains Chaz Ferrari, head of security and spokesman for the route’s President, “If they are in a hurry, or feel that they can protect themselves, they can take a cheap trip. We let the market decide.”