would go; or as an urban planner, given carte blanche to design from scratch a new, magnificent cosmopolis; a mathematician, a topologist or trigonometrist, contemplating space in its most pure and abstract form; an explorer, sea-discoverer, world-conqueror from centuries gone by, standing at his prow as his dominion-to-be hove into view: this virgin territory that he would shape after himself and make his own. Placing my laptop in the middle—the exact, geometric centre—of this clearing, I opened a fresh document and stretched its borders out until it filled my screen entirely. As I did this, though, just as the document’s expanding lower boundary reached the bottom of my screen, my finger momentarily lost contact with the glide-pad; when the finger made contact again, it caused the applications docked invisibly at the screen’s base to pop up, impinging on the clean neutrality both of the screen and of my mind. Trying to hide them once more, I accidentally tapped on the docked news page, which slipped from its box, inflating as it rose, like some malicious genie, taking the screen over—and in an instant, all the extraneous clutter, all the world-debris, that I’d so painstakingly eliminated flooded back into the clearing, ruining it.
8.13 The news page carried new news of the oil spill—of the current one, I mean, the one that had been playing out for the last few weeks. The worst-case scenario, the event that the authorities, environmentalists and the oil-company itself most feared, had come to pass: the oil had reached the mainland. The coastline was snowy; more than just snowy, it was completely snow-covered, swaddled in a huge, unbroken blanket of the stuff. The contact between oil and snow, the impact of the former on the latter, was being shown in close-up, from the land, and long-shot, from a plane—but the same effect could be seen in both views. The snow seemed to absorb and drink in the oil in an almost thirsty way: to blot it up, then pass it onwards through its mass, as though, within the architecture of its vaulted and communicating chambers, their crystalline ice-particles, a series of distribution hubs were secreted. Still sitting at my desk, looking down at the laptop, at the picture on its screen, the streaks and clusters taking shape as oil spread slowly inland, I saw ink polluting paper, words marring the whiteness of a page.
9.
9.1 The next week, I flew off to Frankfurt to speak at a conference. It was held in a new, glitzy building: smart-seats, ambient lighting, corporate logos everywhere. The papers delivered there weren’t really papers as such—more like sales pitches or motivational speeches, each of which, backed by the latest AV software, advanced a “paradigm” for the delectation of assembled delegates. The event was invitational; to be invited was an honour, confirmation that the invitee belonged to the world’s very top rank of paradigm-advancement. I was met at the airport by a man holding a card on which my name was neither handwritten nor printed but rather embossed, then dropped at a hotel that boasted not one but two saunas (the first dry, in the Finnish style; the other, in Turkish, wet). The theme of the conference was—for once!—not The Future. It was The Contemporary. This was even worse. It was, of course, a topic to which I’d been giving much thought: radiant now-ness, Present-Tense Anthropology™ and so forth. But I wasn’t ready to give all that stuff, all those half-formed notions, an outing. Besides which, I’d started to harbour doubts about their viability. These doubts themselves, I told myself in the days before theconference, were what I’d air. To air the doubt about a concept before airing the concept itself was, I thought, quite intellectually adventurous; it might go down well.
9.2 Talks were limited to fifteen minutes each. The other speakers’ PowerPoint presentations moved with sub-second precision from one image to the next as they
8.13 The news page carried new news of the oil spill—of the current one, I mean, the one that had been playing out for the last few weeks. The worst-case scenario, the event that the authorities, environmentalists and the oil-company itself most feared, had come to pass: the oil had reached the mainland. The coastline was snowy; more than just snowy, it was completely snow-covered, swaddled in a huge, unbroken blanket of the stuff. The contact between oil and snow, the impact of the former on the latter, was being shown in close-up, from the land, and long-shot, from a plane—but the same effect could be seen in both views. The snow seemed to absorb and drink in the oil in an almost thirsty way: to blot it up, then pass it onwards through its mass, as though, within the architecture of its vaulted and communicating chambers, their crystalline ice-particles, a series of distribution hubs were secreted. Still sitting at my desk, looking down at the laptop, at the picture on its screen, the streaks and clusters taking shape as oil spread slowly inland, I saw ink polluting paper, words marring the whiteness of a page.
9.
9.1 The next week, I flew off to Frankfurt to speak at a conference. It was held in a new, glitzy building: smart-seats, ambient lighting, corporate logos everywhere. The papers delivered there weren’t really papers as such—more like sales pitches or motivational speeches, each of which, backed by the latest AV software, advanced a “paradigm” for the delectation of assembled delegates. The event was invitational; to be invited was an honour, confirmation that the invitee belonged to the world’s very top rank of paradigm-advancement. I was met at the airport by a man holding a card on which my name was neither handwritten nor printed but rather embossed, then dropped at a hotel that boasted not one but two saunas (the first dry, in the Finnish style; the other, in Turkish, wet). The theme of the conference was—for once!—not The Future. It was The Contemporary. This was even worse. It was, of course, a topic to which I’d been giving much thought: radiant now-ness, Present-Tense Anthropology™ and so forth. But I wasn’t ready to give all that stuff, all those half-formed notions, an outing. Besides which, I’d started to harbour doubts about their viability. These doubts themselves, I told myself in the days before theconference, were what I’d air. To air the doubt about a concept before airing the concept itself was, I thought, quite intellectually adventurous; it might go down well.
9.2 Talks were limited to fifteen minutes each. The other speakers’ PowerPoint presentations moved with sub-second precision from one image to the next as they
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