I’ve always had a utopian streak. As a kid perennially frustrated by school, I wanted nothing more than to grow up and start my own, for kids like me, that would do it right. As a teenager lonely in (what seemed to be) rigid and vapid social circles, and scared of adulthood, I dreamed of co-ops, communes, rural compounds peopled by all and only my friends.

Today my frustration is with my own social habits — my disinterest in strangers, reluctance to explore new places, and most of all, lack of imagination about activities that would break me out of my entrenched paths, places and people. I get excited about a frisbee — “wow, a simple toy that makes the park a destination, and a friend a necessity! An object that will prod me to create new paths through my neighborhood and through my days! And idea of a thing to do!”

Another way to say all this is to complain about our impoverished American (or hopefully just Houstonian!) relationship to public space. But it isn’t for lack of parks or whatever; public space is primarily a function of what we do, shaped but not generated by the places we do it in. My personal habits (avoidance of strangers, poor imagination for possible activities, reluctance to explore new places) are probably not unique. They probably have a lot in common with the Average American Culture-Habit, if such a preposterous thing could be invoked.

Our habitual paths through our cities are increasingly entrenched; cars, cell phones, Google maps — the many-headed convenience uber alles — prune variation and error. Our forays into public space increasingly resemble modern precision warfare, intolerant of the collateral damage of the chance encounter, the unexpected route, the surprise destination, the unplanned evening.

I’m looking forward to the next decade of web development. A significant trend will be the increasingly nuanced mapping of web space to physical space. Transformations similar to those we’ve seen in information space (explosion of flexible new channels, hubs, modalities), and social space (evolution of privacy, read ‘facebook’), are already beginning to reorganize our cities, traffic patterns, and the personal habits that define our public space.

Reorganization is not a good in itself. To some it will look like disruption, threatening stability and our ‘tradition.’ It will certainly inflame the ‘culture war.’ But the procedure is really one of phase change.

“If the system is solid, too crystallized, its dynamics are completely uninteresting. If it’s gaseous, it’s also uninteresting — all you have to do is take averages of behavior and you know what’s going on. Liquids have a lot more potential, with all kinds of attractors and bifurcations. Now what they’re coming to believe is that the liquid state in nature — not just actual liquids, but liquidity in the abstract sense of being not too rigid or too loose — these liquid systems ‘poised on the edge of chaos’ are natural computers.” (from an interview with Manuel de Landa)

I’m excited about the web because it is moving in the direction of liquefying information. RSS items/feeds/channels/aggregators/filters — and their seemingly intrinsic elan towards abstraction, reconfiguration, self-organization — are evidence of exactly the kind of dynamics de Landa is talking about. I’m excited to see the same procedures emerging in the social sphere, vapid as much of the social-web may seem. And I’m excited about yoking these forces of liquefaction to the entrenched patterns of the city.

Here are some points along this trend:
Habitat map
Drop.io location!!
Couchsurfing
Meetup
Geocaching
Commandro
Street wars
Outside.in
The people at Google Maps Mania are keeping a terrific list.