Though he’s better known as the paragon of paraspace, in the Sprawl of his numerous novels, William Gibson has explored the future of cities as much as any urban theorist, expanding upon the topography of late 20th-century exurban development with astute accuracy. “The record of futurism in science fiction is actually quite shabby,” Gibson says in an interview in the Paris Review. “Novels set in imaginary futures are necessarily about the moment in which they are written. As soon as a work is complete, it will begin to acquire a …

I just scribbled this little piece over on my bike site, HEADTUBE. Here’s an excerpt:
I was walking to class today, and I was almost mowed down by a guy on a fixed-gear. I was crossing a street, in the crosswalk, where I clearly had the right of way, but he rang his bell and blew by right in front of me, running the stop sign on the corner. I’d already been conceiving this post in my head and that was the last straw. Being a frequent rider of bikes on …

My good friends Patrick Barber and Holly McGuire (of McGuire-Barber Design — the fine folks who designed my book, Follow for Now) run their own egg cooperative. Well, edible Portland ran a story on them this week — featuring a video clip of just what goes down with the chickens and the eggs. Check it out.

With all of the semi-recent focus on usability, I’ve noticed a growing countermovement that doesn’t get near as much attention: unusability. I’m talking here about deliberately designing something so that it’s not usable, not the much-maligned negligence of design that renders things unusable.

My friend and colleague MC Paul Barman let me run this interview in my book, Follow for Now.
Country by country, oil extraction is peaking, leading to dry wells, sky bells, and land grabs. How much will the final barrel cost? Infinity dollars? The End of Oil: On the Edge of a Perilous New World, the first book by Seattle-based journalist Paul Roberts, is a profound look at the science, politics, and personalities involved in one of Earth’s most cataclysmic issues. I based my smash hit, “Yesterday Is History” on the …

My friends and I always used to do year-end top ten lists of our favorite records of the year. Thinking back through 2003, I decided to archive my favorite ideas of the year. Not that I was let down by music this year, on the contrary, I heard plenty of good records in the ’03 (e.g., Aesop Rock, Kinski, Cex, Prefuse 73, Radiohead, Ilya, Interpol, Mogwai, Tomahawk, Deadsy, Why?, The Blood Brothers, The Mars Volta, Atmosphere, The Roots, etc.), but I thought this would be more interesting. We shall …

The ground on which you walk is the tongue with which I talk — Saul Williams
Mike Davis gives voice to just what the hell we’ve done to our environment, what’s transpiring in the gaps in our relationships with each other, and what goes on underneath the deep and wide footprint of our rampant urban development. Dead Cities (The New Press) is a postmortem excavation of our postmodern urbanscape, a conjugation of all the verbs at work in the human condition.

Systems. It’s not about nouns, it’s about verbs. It’s not about the dots, it’s about the connections between them. Networks, not nodes. The journey, not the destination. It’s a trigger, not a gun.

They’re everywhere: tiny cameras, webcams, security cameras… video-capturing devices are almost as ubiquitous as the banner ads for them: “Watch anyone, anytime.” We’re all stuck somewhere between reality TV and a TV reality. Following the panopticon from an eighteenth century architectural drawing by Jeremy Bentham to the pervasive surveillance of the twenty-first century, CTRL [SPACE] is a comprehensive history of watching and being watched.

You’ve seen them: “Andre the Giant has a Posse” stickers, “Obey Giant” posters, Andre’s face covering entire sides of buildings. You’ve seen them and you’ve wondered what it was all about. And once you found out, perhaps you wondered why.
Nearly the entire world has unknowingly fallen prey to Shepard Fairey’s phenomenological street-media experiment. Long-time friend Paul D. Miller recently described Shepard’s postering activities as “obsessive.”