The Multispace: our lives in the cables

We live in a state of speed. Our presence is no longer constrained by physicality. Our avatars, or perhaps egos, proliferate in virtual mediums like mushrooms in a forest.

What made this thing possible is the entangled world of cables that engulfed Earth into a mega-network.

The World as big as it seems, became a Global City and it is yet to become a more or less friendly Global Village. Filled with places, or better said non-places*, that support the frenetic movement of bodies, images, ideas, and terror, our world is parasitized by a non-historical space: the Multispace.

So what is this space?

The Multispace

Following the definition of the Multispace found in ‘The Metapolis Dictionary of Advanced Architecture’ we understand that space becomes ‘a sort of time’, where distance is no longer perceived in space units but in duration. The transformation of space in time is done through the acceleration of technological means.

We do not live just on streets and in houses anymore, but also in cables, waves and webs.

Fernando Porras in The metapolis dictionary of advanced architecture: city, technology and society in the information age

What we gain, according to the author, is the virtual space- an absence shaped by mathematics [1], that acts like an enrichment of human senses and presence.

But when we think of the Internet, we might not understand that the virtual web is actually supported by a tremendous physical body of cables, computers, and storage halls. I never realized that until I read James Bridle’s ‘New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future’.

Take for example Transpac, the network of undersea cables located under the Pacific Ocean. Owned mostly by the big tech guys, like Facebook or Google, the undersea cables ensure our access to the Internet or Cloud.

Everything you do on the Internet leaves a physical trace transmitted and stored as data in a hidden mega-infrastructure. So a great part of our human life, thought, and communication, becomes a profitable consumable: information, proliferated by cables into the multispace.

Are we wired?

‘Wired’ means connected, and, at the same time, over-excited. It also means being hiper-connected to reality, fully inserted into the web.

Ion Vianu in Frumusețea va mântui lumea și alte eseuri [2]

Humanity has been fascinated by the concept of speed and exceeding body limitations through machines. Take for example Filippo Marinetti’s manifesto written in 1916 „LA NUOVA RELIGIONE- MORALE DELLA VELOCITÀ”- ‘The new religion- morals of speed’.

Marinetti’s obsession with speed translates into a sort of religion that frees humanity from boredom and memory. The religion of speed is enriched by the divine element of the straight line, a symbol of courage and action regardless of danger. The new sacred places are the machines, tunnels, crowded places, and… the war field. [3]

No wonder Marinetti is the founder of Futurism. He believed that museums are ‘cemeteries’, therefore the past is an oppressive memory that needs to be erased and replaced with an industrial time.

Replacing a symbolic time with a mathematical one.

Our desire to erase the past, or better said, to escape the symbol that was perpetuated since the Neolithic through religion, esthetics, and arts, made us transfer part of our lives in the cables that enable the high speed of today.

We are simultaneously present in different virtual mediums with different personas. Our memories and thoughts transform into bits that feed the giant cable infrastructure for the benefit of sharks.

Speed transformed us into goods that are being exchanged, exploited, and surveilled from the cities we are living in, directly into our homes. Even more terrifying: young people, babies, and the environment are subject to this exploitation.

But how else can we get a taste of technology if not by succumbing to the unwritten laws that govern it?

The Chinese Dystopia

Paul Mozur states in the article „Inside China`s Dystopian Dreams: A.I., Shame and Lots of Cameras”, that China’s territory is covered now with around 300 million surveillance cameras. Police wear glasses with facial recognition and their surveillance software- which must be powered by tremendous hardware, is leading toward an ultra-technologized totalitarian regime.

People’s actions no longer become part of the past: actions become information captured into the system that feeds a Shame System. The Chinese Shame System- Sesame Credit, is based on giving points, punishments, or benefits according to the behavior of the people. [4]

One can state that the surveillance state is ensuring a safer place for everybody. That our wrongs deserve to be kept in a database, untouched by the passing of time. I don’t know the answer.

But if people are good out of fear or desire to get benefits, it means we still have a long, long road to go.

The New Actuality

Besides feeding the mega-infrastructure of cables and wires with bits of our life for the profit of some, we are also fed by the information transmitted through the cables back to us. Take for example the television.

Jacques Derrida in his interview ‘The Deconstruction of Actuality’ talks about artifactuality, which is presented on our TVs:

actuality is indeed made: it is important to know what it is made of, but it is even more necessary to recognise that it is made. It is not given, but actively produced; it is sorted, invested and performatively interpreted by a range of hierarchising and selective procedures — factitious or artificial procedures which are always subservient to various powers and interests of which their ‘subjects’ and agents (producers and consumers of actuality, always interpreters, and in some cases ‘philosophers’ too), are never sufficiently aware. [5]

What he means is that Power dictates how we perceive actuality, through a man-made curation of events that serve an interest. Information, as a non-territory entity, is distorted and proliferated as a digital product to feed a society of entertainment and extremes.

So the actuality of the world is most likely a fabrication, introduced into our homes through the cable.

Final thoughts

The multi-space- this absence of space that is a virtuality with endless possibilities and information, is not coming from the clouds. It is deeply embedded here on Earth as a giant physical infrastructure.

We can no longer fully escape our lives in the cables or in the multi-space. It is part of our culture now. What I would do is a genuine return to the symbol, from time to time. The symbol is our link to the non-mathematical space- the historical space, that enriched humanity with art and beliefs about the mysteries of the world.

*see Marc Augé- Non-places: introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity. London & New York, Verso, 1995

[1]Federico Soriano in Manuel Gausa, Vicente Guallart, Willy Müller, Federico Soriano, Fernando Porras & José Morales (Eds.), The Metapolis Dictionary of advanced architecture: city, technology and Society in the Information Age, Barcelona: Actar, 2003, p.443

[2]Ion Vianu, Frumusețea va mântui lumea și alte eseuri, Polirom. Iași, 2021, p.41. (translated from Romanian)

[3] F.T. Marinetti, „LA NUOVA RELIGIONE- MORALE DELLA VELOCITÀ”, in L`ITALIA FUTURISTA, May, 1916

Accessed from: https://www.memofonte.it/files/Progetti/Futurismo/Manifesti/I/81.pdf

[4] Hannah Fry, Hello World! Revoluția informatică și viitorul omenirii, București: Corint, 2019, pp.70–71

[5] Jacques Derrida, ‘The Deconstruction of Actuality’, 1994, p. 28

Accessed from: https://www.radicalphilosophyarchive.com/issue-files/rp68_interview_derrida.pdf

I am an architect passionate about design, heritage, and entrepreneurship. I run the architecture office Kule Arhitectura, and I am currently enrolled in a Master’s Degree in Heritage Conservation. I am happy to share my thoughts and experiences with the world and learn from fellow writers on Medium!