The Committee to Nuke Elysium

Wikipedia is a privately owned public space. Its articles are managed and manicured as carefully as the flora of Zuccotti Park. Just as Wikipedia is groomed for smooth and sensible data retrieval, the privately owned public park is a place for white-collar workers to savor a moment of relaxation so they can return to the bustle of the office feeling refreshed. Zuccotti Park and Wikipedia both make sense in the framework of a neoliberal worldview that understands public spaces—in the city and online—as sites of discrete actions and transactions, as links in logical chains of cause and effect. They are not places so much as they are conduits of productive movement. Ersatz urban environments are built along this principle: the Silicon Valley offices of Google and Facebook eschew cubicles for plazas and promenades, in the belief that shared spaces of locomotion generate productivity and innovation.