Mammoth blog has published the guest post I wrote for them as part of the Mammoth Book Club. It’s about traffic jams, freedom, and, yes, cyborgs.

The chapter they asked me to write about contains one of the most striking passages I’ve read all year. It goes like this:

Over time, the traffic cop was slowly transformed: his hands took on white gloves for visibility; his voice was replaced by a whistle; and eventually, he was elevated in a tower and communicated with the traffic via signs or coloured lights. The police officer slowly vanished, his body evolving into mechanical and electrical devices. His hands were replaced by standardized, colored signals. His eyes were replaced by sensing actuators, such as microphones, pressure sensors, electromagnets, or video cameras. All that was left was to replace his brain.

Sean Dockray, Fiona Whitton, Steven Rowell – Blocking All Lanes – The Infrastructural City p.106

If that doesn’t give you chills, then perhaps you are reading the wrong website?

The full post is here.

Two other things

First, it didn’t fit into the essay, but I want to build on one of the side notes. I have a minor fascination with city-driving car ads aimed at 20somethings. You know the kind: they are living life’s ups and downs, they are going to parties, there is never any traffic. In particular, I love this Scion ad that wants you to associate parkour with owning a car. The essay flowed away from examining this in more detail, but one of the most interesting things about cars is the interaction between their mythology of freedom and reality of tightly regimented movement.

I’m not just thinking about the stop and go signals of downtown gridlock (though the completely obvious contrast between the far ranging movements of Scion’s free runners and the constrained-to-the-road path of the vehicles is perfectly pertinent). I’m talking about the massive architectural network devoted to creating an environment where cars can roam.

For freedom machines, our vehicles are extremely sensitive. They like surfaces of a certain smoothness and within a range of grades. They hate a great variety of weather conditions. They can’t go far at all without needing to refuel. From a wider perspective, the freedom of the car compared to the herded imprisonment of public transit, airplanes, or rail seems pretty marginal. It’s all one dimensional ribbons of connectivity strung across a vast two dimensional plane.

I’ve talked about this theme in the past, the invisible infrastructure of cyborgs.

Second, I would be completely remiss if I didn’t thank August C. Bourré for pointing me to a number of excellent papers relating to this stuff. The final third of the essay was completely reworked based on material he sent my way.

Go read the guest post.

Happy 2010. The deadline for the contest is today (January 1st). Clean yourself up and send in your entry. The rules are here and the post introducing the idea is here.

Don’t forget, the deadline for the b-list holy grails micrononfiction contest is January 1st, 2010. That’s really soon, so send in your entry. The rules are here and the post introducing the idea is here.

I explained all of that in under 50 words. Imagine what you’ll do with 100.

One of my favourite traditions from LiveJournal is the automatic year-in-review post. Here’s how it works: You go to each month, take the first post of the month, take the first sentence of that post and transcribe it. The result is a cut-up-technique overview of how your year went. It doesn’t get your best posts, or your most popular posts, or your most important ones. But it can offer unexpected glimpses and for that, I love it.

So in the waning days of 2009, as I take a break amongst the half-packed boxes I hope you’ll allow me this moment of self-indulgence with an automatic year-in-review (with commentary!) for Quiet Babylon.

January

Seth Godin argues that when it comes to transient or one-time transactions sometimes it’s better to let things go.

From: But Which Lesson?

Back in 2008 I had cut the tether to Quiet Babylon’s original subject matter: video games. I then spent the better part of a year trying to figure out what it was about. This post is typical of that period. Punditry about a celebrity’s punditry. Pointless.

February

No posts

How embarrassing! Let me take this opportunity to further embarrass myself by pointing out that the first subject matter of this site wasn’t really video games. It was whatever this is in 2002. The first incarnation of Quiet Babylon was lost when the registrar I was with folded, taking my domain with it. Squatters took it over and eventually abandoned it, whereupon I re-registered. The files you see are what I managed to preserve. Notice the early obsession with surveillance…

March

Built for the Montreal Expo, Habitat 67 is a wonderful grand-vision failure/success of architecture.

From: Pictures of Habitat 67

Now we’re getting somewhere. Original material, pictures of formerly futuristic architecture, an eye for the broken and leaking.

April

No posts

Quiet Babylon remains adrift.

May

Two stories appeared in rapid succession today on Wired’s excellent Threat Level.

From: Threat Level Context

A proto-post. Starting to synthesize instead of just reply. Too short and not far-ranging enough.

June

Check out this article on Ars Technica about law prof. Patricia Akester’s study examining the effects of DRM on the legal use of copyrighted works.

From: DRM: The Fight Against Posterity