Theft at the Public Till
sense of place. People defined themselves by where they lived. By contrast, perhaps the most significant, enduring accomplishment thus far of the in- formation age is to have fostered the creation of an ethereal reality, which exercises increasing influence over embodied, spatially bound varieties of social life. Here decisions are made and actions taken in ways that eliminate the need for physical presence in any particular place. Knowing where a person, building neighborhood, town, or city is located no longer provides a reliable guide to understanding human relationships and institutions. For within the digital city, key organizational entities have been reconstituted to resemble motherships floating in electronic hyperspace. Occasionally they descend, landing long enough to invest capital, deposit a high-rise building, fund a university research project, close a factory, or launch a clever public-relations campaign. Then, just as quickly, they beam up, dis- appearing into the vapor. Confronted with this potent force, it is difficult for traditional land-based peoples, communities, and even nations to identify exactly where and how the crucial choices are being made. Because power is most effective when least seen, this may be the most insidious political capacity yet devised, one that threatens to turn all the world into a colony. But the colonized are not, as in earlier times, subjects of a particular country or regional economic empire. What governs now has neither boundaries nor surfaces nor mass. It is a phenomenon about which standard social theories and familiar categories of everyday experience have little to say. Indeed, we may soon have to dis- card place-oriented theories and sensibilities altogether because they have become obsolete. In its dazzling complexity, the digital-electronic edifice is something Rube Goldberg could easily admire, a rapidly expanding struc- ture generating new branches, chambers, and passageways in a never-ending process of self-elaboration. Outsiders who seek to penetrate its mysteries are greeted with a maze that is at once formidable and incorporeal, an architec- ture of countless baffling features -- dummy institutions, glossy advertising surfaces, mass media spectacles, channels of participation leading nowhere -- forms that mask the true order of things and prevent anyone from dis- covering the locus of control. While the structure also includes concrete,
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