But I never feel alone anymore. Today, when so many of us doubt the existence of a cultural vanguard, it is significant to note how many recent vanguard ideas have in fact anticipated present developments. Today, our place of residence, the place where we can be reached, has become our bodies themselves, and not the static houses or cities where we mundanely reside. I still believe in the viability of a city-culture. Twenty years ago, only a French guy named Virilio and the strategic planners in the U.S. military understood that in the future it would be speed of communication and not speed of physical movement that would count.
Power becomes instantaneous communication over long distances.
I used to wonder how I could get cash from a bank machine in Italy or Japan, or use my credit card to pay for gas in Los Angeles. The answer is constant instantaneous radiowave communication between the satellites and their computers everywhere on the globe. A call from a cell phone goes to a local antenna. From there it is transmitted to a satellite system that beams it back to the appropriate local cell system, and then to all the cell phones at use in that particular system. Then the phones' computers sort the myriad transmissions until one of them recognizes its own code.