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1 de 9 3/7/18 10:33
J.G. Ballard: Chronopolis – Time Cities and the Lost Future about:reader?url=https://socialecologies.wordpress.com/2015...
2 de 9 3/7/18 10:33
J.G. Ballard: Chronopolis – Time Cities and the Lost Future about:reader?url=https://socialecologies.wordpress.com/2015...
allotted for sleep, eating, speaking, making love, playing with their
children. It was also based on a sophisticated set of color codes
and decodings:
‘There were a dozen socio-economic categories: blue for
executives, gold for professional classes, yellow for military and
government officials – incidentally, it’s odd your parents ever got
hold of that wristwatch, none of your family ever worked for the
government – green for manual workers and so on. But, naturally,
subtle subdivisions were possible. The lower-grade executive I
mentioned left his office at 12, but a senior executive, with exactly
the same time codes, would leave at 11.45, have an extra fifteen
minutes, would find the streets clear before the lunch-hour rush of
clerical workers.’ (Ballard, p. 161)
After a thorough visit through the Time City Conrad will come to
the center and see the great clock itself, asking:
‘Why did it stop?’ he asked. Stacey looked at him curiously.
‘Haven’t I made it fairly plain?’
Scarcity. The highly regulated and over organized populace was
bound to resource scarcity, and the only way they could all share in
its wealth was through absolute command and control of the
resources, of which they were both victims and rulers. The whole
point is recursitivity: the insertion of the human agent back into
the Time Loop of the Regulatory System. Without this massive
regulation of the human agent within the technological system that
kept the running in perfect stasis: a negentropic machine, a
perpetual motion machine bound to the cycles and rhythms not of
organic life but of Time itself and its endless cycles or regulation
and mathematic surplus the whole system would break down and
dissolve.
As Stacy comes to the end of his story he explains to Conrad that
there came a time when people rebelled:
‘Eventually, of course, revolt came. It’s interesting that in any
industrial society there is usually one social revolution each
century, and that successive revolutions receive their impetus from
progressively higher social levels. In the eighteenth century it was
the urban proletariat, in the nineteenth the artisan classes, in this
revolt the white collar office worker, living in his tiny so-called
modern flat, supporting through credit pyramids an economic
system that denied him all freedom of will or personality, chained
him to a thousand clocks . . .’ (Ballard, p. 162)
3 de 9 3/7/18 10:33
J.G. Ballard: Chronopolis – Time Cities and the Lost Future about:reader?url=https://socialecologies.wordpress.com/2015...
Smart Cities
Think on this: Are we not now building the infrastructure for such
a computational world of regulated bodies, a cognitariat that is
nothing more than a mere machine, a member of the machinic
phylum connected and plugged in to the intensive networks of a
Time City that regulates every aspect of their existence in work and
play. With the various Smart City initiatives around the planet
which are only models of the future, rather than the future itself,
or we not seeing the instigation of a 24/7 Society based on total
temporal command and control. One that eventually will replace
humans with robots and advanced AI?
Listen to this blurb for a Sino-Singapore Smart City of the Future:
4 de 9 3/7/18 10:33
J.G. Ballard: Chronopolis – Time Cities and the Lost Future about:reader?url=https://socialecologies.wordpress.com/2015...
5 de 9 3/7/18 10:33
J.G. Ballard: Chronopolis – Time Cities and the Lost Future about:reader?url=https://socialecologies.wordpress.com/2015...
6 de 9 3/7/18 10:33
J.G. Ballard: Chronopolis – Time Cities and the Lost Future about:reader?url=https://socialecologies.wordpress.com/2015...
system furnished with the proper inputs; and that this solution is
something which can be encoded in public policy, again without
distortion. (Greenfield, KL 442)
Greenfield will tell us that underpinning the basic assumption of
most of the grand narratives and corporate hype is a specific
hypothesis about both the future and human behavior. The first
deals with the notion of complexity itself. Most of these companies
reason that contemporary urban environment is so complex and
so vexatious in its demands that no group of ordinary, unaided
human beings can hope to understand it, let alone manage it
wisely. Therefore the new Intelligent InfoSphere will need a new
class of intelligent workers to maintain and reliably oversee the
smooth operation of the systems, while at the same time enforcing
the rules and regulations that bind the InfoSphere citizens to its
regulatory system. Next will be the truth that the cognitariat and
elite themselves cannot be entrusted with this task. As he states it:
Though it’s garbed for the moment in the seductive language of
efficiency, agility and sustainability, we might as well call that
current for what it is: the impulse toward authoritarianism, and
the will to control over other human beings. This impulse is
something that springs eternal in the human heart, no matter what
language or technology it is couched in. It can be suppressed or
defanged locally and temporarily, but it will surely burst forth
again in a different guise, in a different time and place. The smart
city happens to be the aspect in which we confront it in our time.
(Greenfield, 1451)
So already the bottom line is these cities of the future will have as
their founding principles a set of in-built perimeters based on
command and control of both the Smart City itself as a system,
and of the populace that presides and uses its services. As one
ethicist will admit this world has been slow in coming but is
speeding up, accelerating toward a future that is shaping and
colonizing us through the hypermediation of advertising,
corporate pressure, political and social disruption and chaos,
setting the stage for our migration to a fully secured electronic
paradise that will offer us every material advantage. The only thing
it will ask of us is that we give up our freedom. As Floridia will
state it ICTs are as much re-ontologizing our world as they are
creating new realities. The threshold between here (analogue,
carbon-based, offline) and there (digital, silicon-based, online) is
fast becoming blurred, but this is as much to the advantage of the
latter as it is to the former. Adapting Horace’s famous phrase,
7 de 9 3/7/18 10:33
J.G. Ballard: Chronopolis – Time Cities and the Lost Future about:reader?url=https://socialecologies.wordpress.com/2015...
8 de 9 3/7/18 10:33
J.G. Ballard: Chronopolis – Time Cities and the Lost Future about:reader?url=https://socialecologies.wordpress.com/2015...
9 de 9 3/7/18 10:33