The Net Is My Nest

An essay about living in the networked Personal City

I don't like to leave the land, and I'm not talking about Germany where I was born long ago, or Arizona where I now live, but about my land - the few and pretty remote acres of land that I can call mine. Looking up from the monitor and looking out of the window, I see the snowy caps of the White Mountains flickering in the glaring sun. You'd have to drive for hours to find a library, a book shop, a theater, a cinema, or just a department store. We are as the Berliner says "jottwehdeh" - janz weit draußen, really far out.

And at the same time right in the middle of everything.

Geography is no longer destiny, writes William Mitchell in "City of Bits." We've entered the digital age, and everything is possible, and it is possible everywhere. On my remote ranch in the West, I'm not only reading every morning the newest American newspapers and magazines, but also German dailies like "taz" and "Frankfurter Rundschau" hours before subscribers in Berlin or Frankfurt get their printed copy hand delivered. Surfing in America Online or checking out some chat rooms on the Internet, I regurlarly meet European and American friends like I used to do when I was still frequenting the pubs and discos of Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, Miami, or Los Angeles. And when I have to shop, the selection of goods is greater than in famous KaDeWe (the Kaufhaus des Westens, the department store of the West which is the pride of Berlin) - with the possible exception of the Freßabteilung, their legendary food department.

For centuries, there was no alternative of equal value to the metropolitan way of life. If you left the big cities to lead a better and more healthy and more secure life in the country, you were a dropout. You had to leave your friends behind, you had to leave your career behind, and you had to be willing to give up all the advantages and luxuries offered traditionally only by those geographic areas where human beings have settled in large numbers: well payed jobs, a rich choice of goods, a wide variety of cultural offerings and social contacts.

Try to remember those distant times - just a decade ago - when satellite tv and cellular phones, fax machines and Internet access were not universally available or too expensive! You couldn't even move to the "umland" of big cities, to their surrounding countryside, without reducing your professional and private possibilities dramatically; to say nothing of retreating to a remote area or to a foreign country. Today, however, several layers of communication networks are superimposed on the imperfect infrastructure of the material world. Connecting everyone with everything, they eliminate most of the advantages of "being there" and most of the disadvantages of not "being there".

From the medieval marketplace to the mall, from cobblestone alleys to the concrete strips of modern freeways, real cities are material manifestations of human activities, actions frozen in stone and steel and glass, hardware structuring human interaction and channelling the stream of goods and information.

The opening of cyberspace, however, the creation and expansion of this global realm of data, undermined the value of the urban space and usurped a lot of its traditional functions.

First, the financial world - banking, brokering, trading - that once made cities into buzzing centers of commercial activity moved into the nets. Today it makes almost no difference whether you trade from an office on Wall Street or on Main Street or from a desolate cabin in the Rocky Mountains. But money just went online first. By now, it's hard to think of any human exchange or activity that didn't migrate into cyberspace at least partially: faxes and e-mail are making snail mail obsolete, cyberwork and telecommuting reduce the need for office space and physical commute, electronic malls are substituting for suburban malls, newspapers and magazines are published online, live chats and MUDs are replacing business travels, evenings out and other meetings in meatspace.

Everyone who owns a computer and a modem can now build him- or herself a Personal City, an individual home town. We can select a bank from, let's say, Frankfurt, a newsstand from Hamburg, and another one from New York, a library from Washington and merchants from all over the world, virtual stores that offer software for downloading and allow us to order computers and other electronics, books, CDs, wine or steaks online. We can chose a local radio station or a news channel whether it's broadcasting from Europe, the Americas, or Asia. We can become regulars in cybercafes and pubs and chat rooms where we meet with associates, friends and relatives. And we can set up shop in cyberspace.

If we're bold enough to do so, we'll have to compete with tens of thousands of cyberworkers from dozens of countries who already offer their products and services online, particularly of the bit variety. Writers and composers, painters and programmers, financial and other consultants, accountants and lawyers, small businesses that specialize on travel or advertising or data input and data analyzing, editors, translators, graphic artists - they all try to do cyberbusiness.

What sets these virtual shops and companies and meeting places apart from their counterparts in reality, is their global accessability. Where I happen to be, makes no big difference. Whether I live in Berlin or Los Angeles, on a farm in Lüchow-Dannenberg or on a ranch in the West, whether I'm at home or in a hotel, my Personal City, the individual environment that I've constructed for myself and chosen to inhabit, stays virtually the same.

Therefore, how I work is largely independent of my geographic location. In Arizona, I'm doing what I'd do in the Black Forest or on an island in the Baltics. And in fact, I would be hard pressed if I had to tell you something that has fundamentally changed compared with a few years ago when I was still dividing my time between Berlin and Los Angeles - with the important exception that now my life after hours is much more pleasant and relaxed.

Splendid, you might say: But who can afford such a life? Who can afford that kind of cybercocooning? A writer maybe, who can write his books and articles everywhere, artists or members of other privileged professions, but we can't do that, the average person can't, we all have to make a living the regular way.

Frankly, I think, it's exactly the other way round: Very soon, a growing number of members of the middle classes will be unable to afford living in the urban centers. The digital economy diminishes the practical importance of big cities, and at the same time the costs of city life are increasing exponentially - the cost of living for the individual as well as the social costs, the economic transaction costs, the ecological damage done.

Less and less middle class people, the well-educated professionals, will be able and will be willing to put up with the disadvantages, drawbacks, risks and expenses - now that their livelihood doesn't depend on living in big cities anymore.

In the industrial age, the urban way of life made economic sense. Its geographic concentration of human ressources and its spatial separation of living quarters and work places was a necessity of mass production. It therefor created the urban masses, and it created vast well-fare bureaucracies to take care of these masses and to control them.

In our times, this advanced civilization of the masses is losing its economic foundation, and as a result it is now falling apart. In most of the developed Western countries, the health care system and the educational system are in a state of permanent crisis, traffic collapses, crime and environmental problems are escalating. Not just one, but nearly all institutions the industrial age brought forth, the state bureaucracies, the political parties, the unions, the mass media, are sclerotic, and are rapidly losing the trust people once had in them.

Even in those regions of the industrialized world that so far have been spared the worst, a growing part of the population feels a certain discomfort and uneasiness, as polls show. The average conditions of daily life and labor are considered to be a heavy burden - the regulated work in big corporations that leaves no room for individual iniatives, the restrained freedom of action in densely populated and congested cities, and last but not least the boring and frustrating leisure time spent in consumption of mass entertainment going for the lowest common denominator.

There is a saying in German: Stadtluft macht frei - The air you breathe in a city sets you free - which refers to the historic principle whereby a serf became a freeman if he stayed in a city for longer than a year. So, the air of the cities once upon a time was liberating, but today it is just difficult to breathe.

In many Western countries, you can watch a kind of mass exodus from the classical public spheres, a collective epidemic regression out of history and into the timeless enclaves of private life - into home sweet home and into suburbia and into a sheer endless string of holiday trips. To people from other, poorer countries, this may seem an enviable and desirable luxury, a sure indication that, for example, the German middle classes still enjoy a comparably privileged life style. But most of those "Wohlstandsbürger" don't enjoy their lives. For them, all these vacations offer only short escapes from an everyday life that, they feel, restricts and overburdens them.

The German version of luxurious unhappiness may be extreme. But in most developed parts of the Western world and especially among the new middle classes of the digital economy, among knowledge workers, the number of people is growing that resent business as usual. Many of them have already started to take the logical step. Demographics in the US, for example, show a strong trend of migration from the densely populated areas to rural counties. Most of those who are fleeing the metropolitan areas, are well-educated professionals in their middle ages. They trade well-payed positions in big cities and in big corporations for a better life in small towns and remote areas where they start their own small businesses and try to become economically independent.

In the second half of our century, as the economic situation of the lower middle classes improved, this dream of integrating urban civilization and nature reached them, reached us, too. Some might remember a strange fashion of a quarter century ago: Thanks to cheap new printing techniques, everywhere in the Western world the walls of modest apartments in cities and suburbs suddenly were "opening" offering spectacular views on sun drenched beaches, majestic mountain sceneries, or melancholic Mediterranean sunsets.

The fascination with these photographic wallpapers faded fast, but the yearning didn't go away - and now, in the digital age, a growing number of people is able to live the dream. Leaving the big cities and the big corporations, moving the center of your life to the phantasmatic places these photographic wallpapers once brought into your apartment, becoming a high tech nomad or a high tech pioneer home steading in remote areas - that isn't a privilege of elites anymore, it's becoming a real option. It's not something extravagant, something against the grain. In the contrary, it's a move that goes with the trend to a global cybereconomy.

The "Center for the New West" in Denver, Colorado, is monitoring the economic change in our digital age, and they have collected and analyzed dozens of cases of cyberworkers who do business from remote areas. They call them "Lone Eagles," and they think that this trend is "the most important social movement since the rise of the two-wage-earner family." "Lone Eagles", says Philipp Burgess, who's heading the center, "are the first wave of those who are changing the way we live, work, play, learn and move around because of the telecommunications revolution." Joseph Pelton of the University of Colorado in Boulder predicts that in 15 years from now there will be five million lone eagles in the US - ten percent of the then 50 million plus Americans who will telecommute.

They all will spend their working day not in the physical world that surrounds them, but in telespheres, electronically mediated communities where they meet with their business partners and friends - as millions of high tech workers do already today, whether their offices are in New York or Berlin, Toronto or Paris. They all act and interact for hours in an artificial workspace, secluded from the outer world, processing immaterial symbols, calculations, formulas, rates, graphics, and huge amounts of texts.

The car initiated a social mass migration, it drove millions into suburbia. What strange change will the computer create? Will the nets usurpe those functions that are occupied until now by all those office buildings housing banks and insurance companies and the administrative machinery of the state? And what about public buildings like malls, museums, universities or libraries?

How virtual buildings can replace their real counterparts is easily imaginable. In his essay, "Being There. Some Notes on a Cybereal Architecture", Peter Anders gives a good example To render planned buildings realistically inside a computer using CAD techniques is a common procedure today. But what if, Anders writes, "every book and film that the library is to contain has been included in the model. Moving through the modeled stacks, we see every volume of the intended library arranged on the shelves. If we pause to open a book, we see the entire text along with illustrations, possibly catching a whiff of musty paper."

Then Peter Anders asks himself whether this virtual library could make the actual construction redundant. The answer, of course, is yes. Such a cybereal library could perform every function of a real library - and it would be, if I may say so, the ideal library for my - and everybody's - Personal City.

So much on the present state of my Personal City. Obviously, right now it consist primarily of Web sites from all over the world that offer information, services, goods and opportunities to meet and chat with other human beings where ever they live on this planet. But not before long, an important new element will be added to Personal Cities like mine - new inhabitants: virtual humans.

Several institutions and companies are trying to develop them right now. The military alone is spending millions for research. US-Marines are already training on virtual battlegrounds fighting the advanced "DI-Guys" of Boston Dynamics, and US Air Force pilots are training for air battle trying to outmanoeuvre a virtual pilot designed by Paul Rosenbloom of the University of California.

But it's not only the military, that's developing virtual humans. Such humanoids are also wanted by many industries - as patient players and patient patients and undestroyable victims. They are wanted as a realistically re-acting population in 3-D architecture and traffic simulations, they are wanted as tireless digital workers for ergonomic studies, they are wanted as everlasting crash-test-dummies, and they are wanted as humanoid guinea pigs for medical experiments and drug testing - Norman Badler of the center of "Human Modeling and Simulation" at the University of Pennsylvania, for example, has programmed a virtual human, a synthetic, whose blood pressure, respiration, and neurological responses are physiologically correct. "So, if there's no oxygen," Badler says, "and the synthetic doesn't get proper treatment within a logical response time, its brain will die."

The strongest demand for virtual humans, however, exists in the entertainment industry. Special effects studios like James Cameron's Digital Domain and George Lucas' Industrial Light & Magic are spending millions to build synthespians, computer generated virtual actors. They will star in movies, but they will also be used as players in video and computer games, as instructors in learning software, as realistic simulations in theme parks and, last but not least, as cyberguides - that is: as inhabitants of home pages and web sites.

They'll be working in cybershops as 24-hours-multilingual sales persons, as croupiers in online casinos, they'll be the heroes of our favourite web soaps, they'll be the fellow citizens of our Personal Cities - and they could be, of course, our partners in cyber role playing and cybersex. (In fact, as sex was always a major motive and driving force of technological advancements, the "killer application" for virtual humans might very well be their function as sexual partners.)

Whatever the future of virtual humans will be, however, today the goals of the capital rich entertainment industry and of the scientific community are obviously converging. The special effects wizards who are trying to program synthespians that are able to act at least partially autonomously are making extensive use of research from as different areas as artificial and machine intelligence, augmented and virtual reality, expert systems, neural nets, artificial life forms, and robotics - while at the same time many researchers are trying to learn from the advanced ways of graphical representation and animation that have been developed in Hollywood.

Since 1996, a yearly conference on virtual humans, sponsored by Silicon Graphics, the company whose computers run most simulations, brings together special effect wizards and scientists of all kinds - in Hollywood, of course. In the announcement of the first meeting, the organizers wrote: "Virtual Humans will be the growth industry for the 1990s!"

I think, it shouldn't be too long until some of them show up in my Personal City, and who knows, maybe some day some of my fellow global citizens will be virtually human.