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__paper.md (95B)
_bibliography.md (103B)
babylon_notes.md (498B)
(p 13) The modern city is a thinly disguised mechanism for extracting productivity out of its inhabitants.
(p 14) [In a derive] all paths become detours. The goal is disorientation on a daily basis
'Psychogeography', coined by Guy Debord, is the study of how geographical environments (specifically urban landscapes) affect emotions and behaviors.
How do these concepts apply to the modern web?
What type of speculative web can we imagine that values exploration, randomness, disorientation?
beyond_being_there.pdf (1.05MB)
debord_derive.pdf (99.3kB)
derive.jpeg (1.05MB)
designing_friction.pdf (1.79MB)
hallway_ladders.jpeg (829kB)
hallway.jpeg (1.01MB)
hyperarchitecture.jpeg (2.2MB)
interface_ecology_jason_jho.pdf (2.68MB)
internet_barabasi_1999.png (439kB)
inventing_pasts_and_futures.pdf (259kB)
ladders.jpeg (790kB)
map.jpeg (4.27MB)
naked_city.jpeg (1.7MB)
queer_orientations.pdf (437kB)
random.png (536kB)
ruins.jpeg (1.65MB)
scale_free_birth.png (224kB)
scale_free_networks.md (1.21kB)
The internet is a scale free network.
A network is scale free as opposed to random when and not random when its connections are highly uneven and concentrated in hubs, rather than being distributed evenly around an average.
Simply put, the number of connections or links between websites naturally tends to centralize around hubs and not equitably distributed.
Also, it means if we pick a website randomly, there is no good guess we can make about how many links it may have to other websites (the node scale).
As an example, a power grid is closer to a random network. The road network in the USA is closer to a random network. Bonds between atoms, neural networks in different organisms also tend to match random networks more closely.
Citations are closer to a scale free network. Online communities and friends, social networks and followers also tend toward this power law distribution, denoting scale free networks. Small number of hubs and a large number of nodes that have few connections. The actor network is also a scale free network.
Below is a video reference of Katherine Carl, PhD teaching Network Science that explains the concept wonderfully:
scale_free.png (45.5kB)
the_internet.png (3.03MB)