by hand

Mechanical Civilization, Frigid Architecture (Chtcheglov, 1953), Urban Exhaustion (Bookchin, 1974:64)

Born dumb, the city does not anymore hurtle down tracks yet to be laid to destinations unknown, bold, sweaty, steamy and bolt-bursting mechanic. Its once swaggering, drunken, arrogant skyline now lies punch-drunk and sterile[1], subdued and degraded[2], impotent beyond local and profitable appliance (Steiner, 1974:58). Like a mental system it forgets what it does not want to see (Echanove, ??) and like all mental reflexes soon decays into compulsion (Harman, 2005:20 see also Chtcheglov, 1953). An addiction, it convinces us we need it to live….[3] The automated response of unlimited proliferation (Kitayama, 2010e:129), and irresistible unfolding of simulation[4], homogenization, functionalization, and systematic exploitation (Kaufmann, 2001) has infected[5] the high-rise, car-centric, consumer-orientated, functionally segregated and socially divided (Echanove, 2008:1) city. It is an endless repetition, possible to reconstruct from the smallest entity – a desktop computer, maybe a USB drive, or a dropbox folder[6], the homogeneous distribution of consumption in a society rendered homogeneous by production – the justice of capitalism[7].

Nothing Zone[8].

Chain hotels mass-produce/ mass-collected service suggestions/ tendered on printed cards/ by a mass-publicized unseen “cordial host,”/ who ofttimes a thousand miles away,/ sometimes long dead,/ sometimes quite nonexistent/ is “personally interested in you and your comfort,”/ at 200 of your cents on “his” dollar./ (Buckminster Fuller, 1963:10). Please, make yourself at home in a cityscape of cuntless pigeonholes (Sternberg, 1967:103).

[1] after Davis (2002:93, 10).

[2] Galbraith (1977:307-8) on the fate of the Merchant City.

[3] Greenbrier (2006:199)

[4] E.g. Baudrillard.

[5] Pallotta (2010), see Illich (1973:15).

[6] After Koolhaas (1998a:1251)

[7] Di Francia (1982:225). Dead Zone, this Nowhere (Zerzan, 2008b:71).

[8] Norberg-Shulz’s (1969) term (quoted in Zerzan, 2008a). Non-Place (Auge, 1995).