2011-02-25
post/3511315904
Reading New York Empire State of Mind: The Colonization of ‘Up’ (by Ryan Sayre at 3quarksdaily), this part - on the possibility of national borders in the sky, as a consequence of using skyscrapers as docks for airships - struck me.
Nowadays the idea that a building could contain a border seems quaint, or odd, and I wonder if the idea that the internet is its own place with its own rules is slowly going the same way. The utopian hippie/hackers of 1990s declaring the independence of cyberspace are increasingly running into the twin demons of commercial borders - Spotify over there, Rdio/Mog over here, and nothing for most - and political interference - with Egypt and Libya (temporarily) dropping off the net, and the US throwing its weight around to attempt to close down Wikileaks.
I don’t know. Perhaps it’s too early to tell, but there’s something there, I think.
