I never compared notes with the other people about what they thought, though I do remember talking about it maybe two days later at a lunch that we usually had at the New York Institute for the Humanities. And people like Ronald Dworkin were there, and people like that. And I remember talking about this, just very briefly, that it felt like I was thinking about that building rather than the people and all that had happened inside. And I remember a couple of these people at the lunch really were offended. And that is when this new moralism began. I began to notice this new moralism that set in in the case of Manhattan.
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Disposable life. What comes to my mind is a set of dynamics, I think, that are marking the current period, that are marking a difference in the current period. And it is the multiplication of expulsions. And once something is expelled (and I’ll elaborate) it becomes invisible. And that is part of the tragedy, I think.
For me a city…is a complex but incomplete system. And in that mixity of complexity and incompleteness lies the capacity of cities to have very long lives. Much longer lives than very powerful corporations, which often are very closed systems.
I think one first step is to distinguish between traditional banking, which sells money it has (or it can borrow very quickly, whatever) and finance, which sells something it does not have. And in that selling what it does not have lies its creativity. It has to invent instruments. And secondly—and they go together—it has to invade other sectors. Because it itself does not have what it needs to produce.
Cities have become sites, places, for massive deployments of increasingly complex and all-encompassing technical systems, some of them good, some of them dubious.
For me, the notion of urbanizing technology really is part of a larger sort of effort that I’ve been working on for a very long time. … [T]echnologies that enable interactive domains deliver, give, their technical capacities through ecologies that are more than just the technical capacity itself.