Me++

From Cyborg Anthro Wiki

Author

William J. Mitchell (1944–2010), Australian-American architect and urbanist. He was Dean of the School of Architecture and Planning at MIT and later head of the MIT Media Lab's Smart Cities group. Me++ is the third volume of a loose trilogy following City of Bits (1995) and e-topia (1999).

Publication Details

Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003. 259 pp. ISBN 978-0-262-13434-7.[1]

Description

The title is a programming joke with a serious argument behind it: in C-derived languages, me++ increments me — the self, extended by one, continuously.

Mitchell's claim is that the boundary of the individual has become genuinely indeterminate. "I am part of the network, and the network is part of me," he writes, and the book works out what follows for architecture, urbanism, property, privacy and identity. His method throughout is to take a category that assumed a bounded person in a fixed location — the room, the address, the door, the meeting, the workplace, the neighbourhood — and ask what happens to it when people are continuously connected and things are continuously addressable.

Written before smartphones, mass Wi-Fi or social platforms, it describes their consequences with considerable accuracy.

Key Ideas

  • The electronically extended body. Mitchell traces a sequence of extensions — clothing, then rooms, then buildings, then cities, then networks — arguing that each is a further layer of the same envelope, and that wireless connection removes the last requirement for that envelope to be continuous with the body.
  • Trial separation. His term for the decoupling of activities that were bound together by the need for physical co-presence: work from workplace, purchase from shop, conversation from room, spectacle from venue. Once separated, each can be recombined differently, which is the mechanism behind most changes in urban form he documents.
  • From containers to networks. Architecture has historically been the design of containers: rooms with clear boundaries, one function each, entered through doors. Networked activity makes the container a poor primary unit, and Mitchell asks what an architecture organised around flow and access rather than enclosure would be.
  • Footprints, presence and the "post-sedentary" city. The dissolution of the fixed workplace and the fixed home into a distributed set of temporarily occupied points, with consequences for transport, real estate and the meaning of an address.
  • Vulnerability of networks. Written in the aftermath of September 11 and of the early large-scale internet worms, the book is unusually attentive to the fragility of highly connected systems, and to the observation that the same properties that make a network efficient make it attackable.

Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology

Me++ is the architectural statement of the cyborg thesis, and it is valuable here because Mitchell asks the question from the building's side rather than the body's. If people are networked, what should be built? His answer — that the assumptions encoded in walls, doors, addresses and zoning are assumptions about bounded persons, and that those assumptions have quietly stopped holding — remains largely unaddressed by the built environment two decades later.

References

  1. ↑ Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City, MIT Press.
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