/lit/ - Literature

>As cybernetics matured and expanded to encompass ever- larger and more intricate ‘objects’ – typically under alternative names, such as ‘general systems theory’ – it increasingly encountered very-long-range trends to continuous acceleration, bound only by weak and transient limits. Through application to the core dynamics of cosmological, biological, social, and technological evolution, cybernetics shifted its emphasis. Runaway, self-reinforcing processes became the central object of attention, and a ‘second cybernetics’, emphasizing the role of positive feedback phenomena, adopted the principal piloting role. Self-sustaining explosions, rather than dampening mechanisms, were now the primary cybernetic theme.

>Civilization is an accelerating process, not a steady state. As its name suggests, it is channeled primarily through cities (which explode). The incandescent intensity of a hypergrowth- dominated urban future consumes our historical horizon, and an exceptionally impressive perspective on this developing spectacle is to be found in 21st century Shanghai – a fact Hollywood has no real choice but to relay.

>Templexity is indistinguishable from unbounded real recursion, so it cannot be lucidly anticipated independently of a historical completion – or ‘closure’ (apprehended in the multitudinous sense noted in the text to follow). There could only have been a beginning – a prolegomenon to the rigorous formulation of templexity as a question – and the topic itself retracts this, even before its proposal. The real process is not the resolution of the problem at the level it appears – dramatically – to have been initially posed, but its re-absorption into the alien cognitive matrix which inherits it. ‘Templexity’ – as a sign – marks the suspicion that, if we are waiting for this to happen, we still understand nothing.

>A ‘city of the future’ is Gibsonian in precisely this sense. That is nothing new, nor could it be. It has always leaked back, in coincidence with modernity. Tomorrow is a social magnet, as has been known for some considerable time, at first merely reflectively, but ever increasingly as a techno-responsive object. It is in part an excludable good, and not uncommonly even a positional one, even if the simultaneous – and extraordinary – inclusiveness of futuristic spectacle will also tend to delay us. Panoramas are rarely perfectly privatized, but the future is not available just anywhere. On the contrary, it is the object of multi- level, intense competition. It is something to be cultivated, tended, bought, sold, and built upon.