Life in the Meta City by William Gibson

Picture from Tech Europe
http://blogs.wsj.com/tech-europe/2011/05/27/explore-victorian-london-through-the-maps-of-the-day/

  William Gibson's essay, <Life in the Meta City>, can be summarized by two of the sentences at the very end: "The future of cities will consist of two different modalities combined within the ageographical and largely unrecognized meta city that is the Internet"(1), and  "We all Inhabit the meta city now, regardless of physical address."(1)

  Gibson defines a city as the place of various "choices", where we observe and encounter numerous populations and unusual situations, and where weird coincidences continuously happen. It is the liveliness and the interaction of strangers dwelling and moving about in one place that characterizes the city; city allows this coexistence of various populations. However, Gibson laments that the current, fully developed cities are fixated to serve as only one purpose that they cannot be used as any other purposes; they are "too throughly built to do some specific something that's no longer required"(2). It is like "Disneyland" where the theme is created and “repurposing” is impossible. “Choice reduction” is how he described this condition. He takes the reason to be the shortsighted vision and its resulted, inflexible social norm. 

  What Gibson presents as a solution, is to turn to the less developed and partially ruined cities in the world, for they are capable of “extended fugue of retrofitting”(1), and reversing the city’s purpose to another direction. He also adds technology to these incomplete cities to be the ultimate future models of the cities of the world, since digital technology has lead us to an "ageographical" world where we can freely roam about in such short span of time and spaces, and know about the cities as if we really live there. 

    Gibson's fascination of cities is shown very well in his science fiction, or cyberpunk novel called Neuromancer. The setting of the novel is in a ruined city in the near future, where drinkers, hackers, and prostitutes proliferating in the dark, unfurnished bars. It seems like the characters of the books travel through cyberspace and come out, back to the suburban city. After reading the essay, I understand why Gibson had connected ruined city and digital world to describe the future of the earth.






References


1. William Gibson's essay, Life in the Meta City
Sep 2011, ScientificAmerican.com p.88-89


2. Aaron Shattuck and Gary stix, Cities in Fact and Fiction: An interview with William Gibson
Friday, Aug 26, 2011 2011 Scientific American, A Division of Nature America, Inc. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=gibson-interview-cities-in-fact-and-fiction