If enough people see the machine, you won't have to convince them to architect cities around it.
~~ Apple CEO Steve Jobs

More significant than the World Wide Web.
~~ Venture capitalist John Doer

[laughs]
~~ Amazon founder Jeff Bezos

On 9 January 2001, Inside.com posted a message regarding a $250,000 publishing deal involving Harvard Business School Books, inventor Dean Kamen, and an invention that "was more significant than the World Wide Web." In the next 24 hours, the Yahoo!, Inside.com, Slashdot.org and the Fucked Company message boards exploded with rapid-fire debates about what 'IT' (aka Ginger) could possible be. An IT portal was even founded.

By January 12, the secret of 'IT' was divulged: 'Ginger' was probably a prototype scooter, equipped with realtime balance controls. WTFF? Was this significant invention just an urban legend? A benign form of memetic engineering?An advertising virus par excellence? Were the Digerati fooled?

The backlash was quick and savage. "OK, people, people, it's a fucking scooter," NetSlaves.com moderator Steve Gilliard wrote. "Not the flying car of your dreams." Plastic.com was more abrupt: IT was "found on so damn many Web sites that we almost didn't run this."

After the media hype, the only people that seemed truly happy about the IT debacle were the moderators who saw their traffic rates jump for online discussion forums.

They totally missed the point: IT is a "wake-up signal" for the post-millennial future, a future where over 60% of the world's population are on the wrong side of the Digital Divide. A future where countries with explosive population growth, such as China and India, will face serious urban design problems and congested resource flows. For these citizens of Spaceship Earth, a scooter with realtime balance controls is an affordable--and non-polluting--form of transportation. This invention has potential, for these citizens, to have more immediate impact on their lives than the Internet. More significant than AOL Instant Messaging capability.

Why has this significance been overlooked? The possible reasons why are revealing.

R.U. Sirius has argued that when Wired Magazine annointed Marshall McLuhan as its patron saint, we lost a Key to possible futures that may yet exist. If we had looked through the eyes of Buckminster Fuller, who was deeply concerned with harnessing nature's flows, rather than just hunting through the datastream to decipher another message, we might also see what Steve Jobs, John Doer and Jeff Bezos did.

Another perspective is offered by Radical Urban Theory, whose leading exponent, Mike Davis, has discerned the "views from futures past." In his influential book City of Quartz: Excavating the Future of Los Angeles (London and New York: Verso, 1999), Davis noted that regional transportation planning agencies controlled a key vector of urban growth management by 'traffic flow standards' (218).

Furthermore, Manuel De Landa compellingly argues in A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (New York: Zone Books, 1997) that urban and technological forms are not deterministic, but rather shaped by the internal morphogenetic capabilities that lie within the flex-flow of matter-energy itself (hence, regulatory 'traffic flow standards'). Transportation planning agencies are, therefore, trying to control a key vector that has its own chaotic trajectory.

The result of merging Davis and De Landa's insights is revealing: we are in the middle of a low intensity conflict, fought through architectural forms and urban planning. A conflict more fleeting--and dangerous--because it slips beneath our radar by not conforming to our conventional understanding.

We can now grasp the true significance of IT. If we are to avoid the noir futures that Mike Davis has already excavated, then we need technology that will break the "vicious cycles" we have inherited from transportation planning agencies. We need a technology breakthrough, as Fuller argued, that can do more with less. And, we need an educated media that can grasp this multidimensionality.