More akin to the Roman Empire’s concept of civitas mobilis augescens, the distinction between the twentieth-century metropolis and the Roman model of a city must be sought in the eminently biopolitical character of the modern-day post-metropolis, conceived by Hardt and Negri as the new hegemonic paradigm of production. As a result, the primacy of time over space has been established as the only possible way of measuring the proximity of productive relationships: everything that can be converted into information is instantaneous (...) and the value of goods depends not on the requirements of its production process but on the cost of its transportation. As a kind of Phenomenology of the Urban Spirit, this paper develops the main milestones in the historical unfolding of this Logic of the Absolute Urban Spirit. (shrink)

In utopian/science fiction literature, comprehensive knowledge is a familiar motif that also inspires recent policies to screen society through surveillance. In the late 20th century, a digital archive promised to facilitate quick access to abundant information and effective strategies to confront myriad challenges. Yet, today, the scale and scope of information accumulation in national and corporate repositories is reaching proportions whose intelligent processing excedes human capabilities, and triggering a shift in focus from dumb repository to artificial intelligence. Processing such accumulation (...) of knowledge necessiates skills commonly attributed to divinity. Without a theory that recognizes this condition and informs the operations of artificial intelligence, the latter is likely to fail in human ways, e.g., by perceiving false patterns resulting from flawed theories assigning meaning to knowledge. For successful pattern recognition to occur, theories must rest on science fiction and a digital ontotheology of the machine as the form this archive assumes. (shrink)