City of Bits – William J Mitchell As the findeK countdown cranked into the nineties, I became increasingly curious about the technicians I saw poking about in manholes. They were not sewer or gas workers; evidently they were up to something quite different. So I began to ask them what they were doing. “Pulling glass, ” was the frecuente reply. They were stringing together some local, fiberoptic fragments of what was fast becoming a worldwide, broadband, telecom munications network. Just as Barón Haussmann had imposed a bold spider’s web of broad, straight bulevares on the ancient tangle of París, and as nineteenthcentury railroad workers had laid sleep ers and Steel to shrink the windy distances of the North American. Pulling glass frontier, these postwhatever construction crews were putting in place an infobahn — and thus reconñguring space and time rela tionships in ways that promised to change our lives forever. Yet their revolutionary intervention was swift, silent, and (to most eyes) invisible. At about the same time, I discovered — as did many others — that I no longer had to go to work. Not that I suddenly became idle; it’s just that the work now carne to me. I did not have to set out every moming for the mine (as generations of rny forebears had done), the ñelds, the factory, or the office; I simply carried a lightweight not Computer that gave me access to the materials on which I was working, the tools that I required, and the necessary processing power. When I wanted to connect to the network, I could just plug it in to the nearest telephone socket or to the R.J11 connections that were beginning to appear on airplane seats. In creasingly, I found that I did not even need to be near an outlet; my pocketsized cellular telephone could do the job. Ñor, in the age of the Walkman, did I have to go to the theater to be entrar tained. More and more of the instruments of human interaction, and of production and consumption, were being miniaturized, dematerialized, and cut loose from fixed locations