Cities are wealth creators; they have always been.” He quotes urban theorist Richard Florida who claims that 40 of the largest megacities in the world, home to 18% of the world’s population, “produce two-thirds of global economic output and nearly 9 in 10 new patented innovations.

The traditional gauge of economic success is profit, but over time we’ll find that such statistics as measures of GDP tell us less and less about broader efforts to improve human well-being. Much of the Web’s value is experienced at the personal level and does not show up in productivity numbers. Buying $2 worth of bananas boosts GDP; having $20 worth of fun on the Web does not. And this effect is a big one. Each day more enjoyment, more social connection, and, indeed, more contemplation are produced on the Web than had been imagined even 10 years ago. But how do we measure those things?

at this juncture of the 21st century we are more aware of ourselves—we are more aware of our past—than culture has ever been before. Because of the internet, because of our tremendous archives that we’ve accrued, the culture of the past is open to us. And as we look at it, we can see that it’s a fabulous junkyard of ideas that may have been incredibly beautiful—and may have had an awful lot of life left in them—that have been discarded by the relentless forward rolling of culture and our insistence upon new things every day. I think that we’re now in a position where we can look back at the wonderful, glorious remains of our previous cultures—our previous mindsets—and we can use elements from that treasure trove to actually craft things that are appropriate to our future.

Every two years or so, a new British political drama turns up that takes everyone by surprise. Usually, the show is pre-hyped as the Year’s Big Political Drama, such as STATE OF PLAY, the last series to have that kind of impact and prestige. Nobody expected the next one would be this new series of TORCHWOOD. Davies has taken the genre of Science Fiction and the by-now expected conventions of TORCHWOOD and used them in the service of a very adult message calling for holding the government accountable and even mass rebellion. At a time when British Television is in danger of drowning in crappy reality shows, market share, ratings wars and celebrity talk shows about nothing, it’s bracing that CHILDREN OF EARTH should be the one show to remind us that scripted drama can actually be about something, and TORCHWOOD has finally become a proper adult Science Fiction show.

The point of these techniques is that they allow research on temporality, on the nature of time. In standard video playback, time is identical to time as we live it. In the techniques described above, something is revealed about time: we gain a new perspective on events, wherein beginning, middle, and end are seen simultaneously. When ordinary time is removed from an event, extraordinary things are revealed. A single event can have any of an infinite number of manifestations depending on the time-angle it is viewed from.

Collectively, these time-perspectives can be called “the atemporal”. Atemporality is a reality, not an illusion. We cannot see the atemporal in life because we are bound by time. These techniques provide views of atemporality.

How to explain the significance of the desire to come to a new understanding of time? It could be an intellectual project, an epistimological inquiry into the nature of our knowledge of the world. Alternately, it could be an emotional response to the universal experience of powerlessness before the inevitability of loss and mortality.

In the age of cheap facts, we now inhabit a world where knowing something is possible is practically the same as knowing how to do it.

The Mir space station itself is ten years old. It has had at least one fire on board. No one has any idea how to “de-orbit” the decaying station safely, but the Russians hope that American money and American technology will keep the station running through the turn of the century. The Soviet tracking ships, which once kept a global communication net running for the sake of space exploration, have been sold, scrapped, or have ended up rotting in the harbors of the breakaway Ukraine. The Mir station can only speak to Russian ground control in ten- to-fifteen minute bursts, broken by up to ten hours of enforced silence as it flies over areas of the globe where Russia no longer has radio presence.

All of which brings me to the notion of audience. Back in the days of old, when print was king, we would speak of “reaching an audience”. We would talk of doing these things via advertising, or appearances – which were when you’d show up somewhere in the real world, deface books with ink and communicate using small mouth noises. What we meant by “reaching an audience” was “devising ways in which we force strangers to give us their money in exchange for ideas and maybe a joke or two”. This has changed in fairly savage ways. The complex net of processes designed to take your money and give it to me is kind of ragged, what with newspapers collapsing and the concept of authority being passed from journalists to the BoingBoing crew to, in 2009, a Twitter post from the sainted Stephen Fry. It was great to get a review in a music paper (remember those?) and it was amusing to see Oprah recommending Cormac McCarthy’s The Road to housewives, but here’s the new audience mediation: Stephen Fry popping up on your bloody iPhone to tell you he’s enjoying reading The Watchmen graphic novel.

1. Literature is language-based and national; contemporary society is globalizing and polyglot.

2. Vernacular means of everyday communication — cellphones, social networks, streaming video — are moving into areas where printed text cannot follow.

3. Intellectual property systems failing.

4. Means of book promotion, distribution and retail destabilized.

5. Ink-on-paper manufacturing is an outmoded, toxic industry with steeply rising costs.

6. Core demographic for printed media is aging faster than the general population. Failure of print and newspapers is disenfranching young apprentice writers.

7. Media conglomerates have poor business model; economically rationalized “culture industry” is actively hostile to vital aspects of humane culture.

8. Long tail balkanizes audiences, disrupts means of canon-building and fragments literary reputation.

9. Digital public-domain transforms traditional literary heritage into a huge, cost-free, portable, searchable database, radically transforming the reader’s relationship to belle-lettres.

10. Contemporary literature not confronting issues of general urgency; dominant best-sellers are in former niche genres such as fantasies, romances and teen books.

11. Barriers to publication entry have crashed, enabling huge torrent of subliterary and/or nonliterary textual expression.

12. Algorithms and social media replacing work of editors and publishing houses; network socially-generated texts replacing individually-authored texts.

13. “Convergence culture” obliterating former distinctions between media; books becoming one minor aspect of huge tweet/ blog/ comics/ games / soundtrack/ television / cinema / ancillary-merchandise pro-fan franchises.

14. Unstable computer and cellphone interfaces becoming world’s primary means of cultural access. Compositor systems remake media in their own hybrid creole image.

15. Scholars steeped within the disciplines becoming cross-linked jack-of-all-trades virtual intelligentsia.

16. Academic education system suffering severe bubble-inflation.

17. Polarizing civil cold war is harmful to intellectual honesty.

18. The Gothic fate of poor slain Poetry is the specter at this dwindling feast.

On the other hand, maybe this is the way that “design fiction” is *destined* to look. My feeling is that good “design fiction” ought to be like good “critical design,” it ought to be subtle and taut and aimed at provoking some cognitive dissonance. But maybe that’s a niche effort doomed to blow right over most people’s heads. Scifi is pop culture. Most design guys I know, who are into science fiction, like big, glossy, popular, sci-fi movies and television shows. They’re not mulling over JG Ballard’s architectural thinking on their way to the Dunne and Raby exhibit.

Instead, they think that science fiction should act as an emollient to loosen up a mass audience, so that one gets a groundswell of useful consumer demand for unrealized objects and services that designers can then design