My wife and I walked into Manhattan this morning over the Brooklyn Bridge, partly as our own kind of tribute, but partly because we were really wary of taking the subway. I recalled my own experience of 9/11 - I found out about 9/11 largely through failed interactions with collapsing infrastructures. I woke up late, around 9:30 am, and because most of the civilian telecoms infrastructure had collapsed under massive load by then, there were no ringing phones to wake me up. I showered, left home, and started walking west down Houston Street towards the F train subway. The streets were totally congested, and road construction guys were directing traffic away from Lower Manhattan. The subways were closed. I remember thinking to myself, "man, the infrastructure is this city is really letting me down today."
In many ways, 9/11 was about taking the infrastructure of global capitalism and imploding it back on itself. It illustrated how delicate our networks are and how powerfully destructive they are, if some outside force can deflect their flows just a few degrees off trajectory.
But perhaps more so, 9/11 demonstrated just how resilient post-industrial capitalism has become, because we depend less and less every day on heavy legacy infrastructure and more on lightweight, agile alternatives. Financial markets took a beating after the New York Stock Exchange closed for nearly a week - but life on the NASDAQ and other decentralized online markets went on as usual. The U.S. economy shuddered from 9/11 but recovered as the nation absorbed what turned out to be a very small recession highly localized in the New York metro area. Firms displaced by the physical destruction at Ground Zero rapidly reconvened in new quarters elsewhere, working by laptop and Blackberry from homes and hotels in the interim. The damage to the Pentagon had negligible real impact on the operational capabilities of the Defense Department, whose real intelligence is deliberately scattered across the globe.
So sometimes in my mind, while I still think of 9/11 as the day the infrastructure collapsed, and have written about those failures (especially the telecom failures), perhaps we should instead think of 9/11 as a looking glass into how our "machines for living in" as Le Corbusier called them, really function. Even a city as centralized as New York is, is finely stitched together with an increasingly dense web of lightweight links and connections that are the true flesh of our networked society.
Yes! Finally a discussion about this. Thanks for putting words to this idea.
Posted by: Jill | September 13, 2006 at 06:14 PM