A digital city does not consist of bricks, concrete and cobblestones, but of telephone lines and electronic connections. Can such a city work? Last year, the Balie cultural centre started such an experiment, together with the 'xs4all' [ex-'hacktic'-transl] foundation. Anyone who's got a phone, a modem, and a computer can log into the digital city host computer and walk around town like a digital spirit: she can visit the central station, the digital cafe, and the electronic town hall. Marleen Stikker is the 'mayor' of Amsterdam Digital City (DDS), and she looks back at one year of promises fulfilled and unfulfilled.

"Well, of course, sometimes the level of discussion in a particular newsgroup is no higher than on chatterboxes; and you do have the occasional rabid rightist spreading racist smut on the net. But generally speaking, life in the DDS is pretty much OK. It's just like an ordinary city" says Stikker, "everything you'd come across in ordinary life, we get here too."

  

Everyone needs good tools

"In the beginning we were really afraid that the response would come only from that small band of 'computer-hackers' and BBS types you always encounter in this sort of project" says Stikker, who adds, "what you call the 'early adapters', very young kids mostly, who have grown up without a push button syndrome." Fortunately, it soon turned out that was not the case. 'Ordinary' people too, purchased a modem and went online. Yet Stikker is still far from satisfied about the rate of participation to DDS. "The digital population has a long way to go before being a true representation of the public at large." There are still far too few women, senior citizens and miority groups. A newsgroup that was set up especially for women was invaded in no time by men. Stikker: "You wouldn't believe it, all these guys were sitting there discussing women's issues. Till one of them said: look folks, if I was a woman, I wouldn't dig that!"

Sushan Tan

Somewhere in the course of the eighties of the twentieth century, history took a turn in another direction. Once it passed its apogee in time, once it reached the peak of the curve in its evolution, its solstice of history, a sliding back of events set in, an unfolding of inverted meaning. As in the case of cosmic space, historical space-time would also have a curvature. By way of the same chaotic effect in time as in space, things go faster and faster as they approach their culmination, just like the flow of water speeds up mysteriously as it approaches the waterfall. In the Euclidean space of history, the fastest route from one point to another is a straight line, the one of Progress and Democracy. This however only pertains to the linear space of the Enlightenment. In our non-Euclidean space of the end of the century, a malevolent curvature invincibly reroutes all trajectories. The phenomenon is doubtlessly linked to the sphericity of time (visible on the horizon of the end of the century just like the earth is visible on the horizon at the end of the day) or to the subtle distortion of the field of gravity. Segalen says that on an Earth become a sphere, every movement distancing us from a point also brings us closer to that same point. This is true with respect to time as well. Every noticeable movement of history brings us imperceptibly closer to its antipode, indeed to its point of departure. This is the end of linearity. Viewed from this perspective, the future no longer exists. And if there is no future, neither is there an end anymore. And yet this is not what is meant by the end of history. What we have to deal with is a paradoxical process of reversion, a reversal of effect with respect to modernity which, having reached its speculative limit and extrapolated all its virtual developments, disintegrates into its rudimentary components through a catastrophic process of recurrence and turbulence.

Jean Baudrillard    

Simulation is precisely this irresistible unfolding, this linkage of things as if they had a meaning, so that they are no longer controlled or regulated except by artificial montage and non-sense. It is the putting up for auction of the event through radical disinformation, the price-tagging of the event instead of gambling with it, instead of investing in the stakes of history. If, on the other hand, should there be a stake in this, it remains occult, enigmatic, and resolved in events that have never really taken place. And I am not talking about ordinary events, but of the events of the East [Eastern Europe], of the Gulf War, etc. What the Agency otherwise specifically aimed at was to oppose this simulation with a radical dissimulation, to lift the veil from this non-happening of events. It has also occultized and enigmatized itself in their image in order to open up and clear to the way to a particular void, to a certain non-sense - unlike the media which remains relentlessly bent on filling up all interstices. Its aim was to manoeuvre itself in the void of events like Chuang-Tzu's butcher proceeds in the interstitial void of the body.

This surreptitious, sly intervention in the meaning of the void against grotesque infatuation with information and the political scene, evidently could not amount to more than a dream and because of its assumed occult and enigmatic nature, it ended up not taking place like the events themselves. It fell into the same black hole, into the same virtual space as the non-events which it should have addressed (secretly however, and without anyone knowing, it remained operational in the image of these new events which were either mediatized or not). An apparently insolvable paradox. The idea, though, is not dead.

Jean Baudrillard