Neill lin

FORTITUDO MEA IN ROTA1 (Latin: "My strength is in the wheel�)

Neill Lin

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1. IF ON A WINTER’S NIGHT A TAXI DRIVER2 2. OUTSIDE THE TOWN OF COLONNATA 3. LEANING FROM THE STEEP STEPS 4. WITHOUT FEAR OF WIND OR VERTIGO 5. LOOKS DOWN IN THE GATHERING PEOPLE 6. IN A NETWORK OF PEOPLE THAT ENLACE 7. IN A NETWORK OF PEOPLE THAT INTERSECT 8. ON THE CARPET OF MARBLE ILLUMINATED BY THE MOON 9. AROUND THE EMPTIED CAVERNS 10.WHAT CITY DOWN THERE AWAITS ITS END

TRAVIS BICKLE, age 26, lean, hard, the consummate loner. On the surface he appears good-looking, even handsome; he has a quiet steady look and a disarming smile which flashes from nowhere, lighting up his whole face. But behind that smile, around his dark eyes, in his gaunt cheeks, one can see the ominous stains caused by a life of private fear, emptiness and loneliness. He seems to have wandered in from a land where it is always cold, a country where the inhabitants seldom speak. The head moves, the expression changes, but the eyes remain ever-fixed, unblinking, piercing empty space. Travis is now drifting in and out of the New York City night life, a dark shadow among darker shadows.

Not noticed, no reason to be noticed, Travis is one with his surroundings. He wears rider jeans, cowboy boots, a plaid western shirt and a worn beige Army jacket with a patch reading, "King Kong Company 1968-70�. He has the smell of sex about him: Sick sex, repressed sex, lonely sex, but sex nonetheless. He is a raw male force, driving forward; toward what, one cannot tell. Then one looks closer and sees the inevitable. The clock sprig cannot be wound continually tighter. As the earth moves toward the sun, Travis Bickle moves toward the city without driver and ruler, in 2029, Cararra, Italy.3

1.If on a winter’s night a taxi driver travels from 1973 to 2029, how will labor be defined? What will ownership become? What will living be like? Production and labor in the present are not a specialist field but an essential part of life in the capitalist mood of Economy. Cities formed in this specific context thrive on capital. So, what is capital?

What does it do? And what will it become? To fully understand the idea, first we need to trace back to the time where it all started. I would personally define the first turning point of the coming of modern city as the operation that began on October 7th, 1913 for the Ford Model T. The concept was actually introduced at Ford Motor company by William Klann after a business visit to a slaughterhouse where carcasses were butchered as they moved along a conveyor. As citizens, we see that automobiles define our cities on the surface where roads, spaces, buildings have been designed in a way that allow automobiles to drive through, to park at, to travel with or just stop-by. As architects, we see the invisible hand that allows and assembles the production of automobile. Keep in mind that the image of the invisible hand did not include the face of whom the hand belongs to. Just like you have friends and enemies, all corporates have rivalries. On the one hand there is the picture of Henry Ford changing the method of production, owning the company that rises rapidly in terms of annual profit, market capitalization, and U.S. market share. On the other hand, General Motors was capitalized on September 16, 1908 as a holding company. It then rapidly acquired more than twenty companies including Oldsmobile. The list of companies it bought includes Vauxhall of England which was acquired in 1925 and Opel of Germany which was acquired in 1929. While Ford continue to work on refining the manufacturing process, GM was inventing new ways of managing a complex global organization. The competition between the two was set in 1922, three years after GM offered financing via GMAC, the monthly payment option. With the magic of capital, GM have taken the lead in the race for the following hundred years. The whimsically shaped hands of the two corporates are called capitals which is the context our modern cities survive on.

According to Saint Girolamo, the name Carrara derives from car meaning "wagons" and iara meaning "Moon", so it is the “City of the Moon on the Wagons”. What does that mean, both you and I have not even a clue yet. The only clue we have for where the story is going are the few lines above concerning “if on a winter’s night a taxi driver”. Why is he from New York? Why is he a taxi driver? And most importantly, why is he specifically the taxi driver that looks like he just came straight out from the movie Taxi Driver? As an inquisitive reader, you must be dying to know. Along the story of repressed, lonely, not noticed taxi driver, the promise of New York City seems to evaporate in the smoke. In fact, not just the hope of some kind of new, promising “city life” built on tube lines, highrises, co-ops, democratic-politics but also the hope for a “life” that is not as sad, confusing, lonely as the one before. Taxi driver is the most common, the most down-toearth job that appears in urban environment. It has a long complicated history that traces back to horse wagon, the assembly line by Ford, the black cab, the yellow cab, the Uber, and most recently Liber-Taxi. Not only that, it also has its promiscuous relationship with architects like Ryner Baham. In the original Taxi Driver, Travis is depicted as the rebel to New York City and its law and customs. Similar to the tactic of getting better box-office receipts, anarchy is portrayed in the image of destruction, ruin.

But in fact, it simply means: no government.

2.Outside the town of Colonnata the taxi driver meets the ghost of his own image. The character of urban taxi labor in the present is quite distinguished from the one ten or

twenty years ago when taxicab plainly means a type of vehicle painted yellow for hire with a driver. It was painted yellow for its visibility. The drivers used radio to communicate with each other and the dispatch offices. The efficiency had gradually increased in the industry with tech-innovations like the GPS coordinates and the evolving telecom coverage. Other than the tech-related refinement in the industry, taxi has undergone dramatic change in terms of working hour, labor rights, and self-image of driver. Almost every city has some news report about gathered taxicabs protesting for topics ranging from lowering wage, increasing driving hours, a career prospect not ideal for retirement. In these events we can see the historical picture of classic working class struggles. The launch of Uber in 2011 gave the final blow to the already-too-strained taxi industry. By using two-way rating system, dynamic pricing model Uber quickly became the most affordable, and most convenient taxi service. Without employer, Uber drivers are considered independent contractors that run parallel to the existing industry. The success of Uber led to waves of protests from taxi drivers in the cities that Uber is operating. The success of Uber is without a doubt, but there are drawbacks. First, Uber will never reach many remote villages around the world because Uber essentially is a need-based system. Second, the local government might possibly restrict the business by law under pressures from local taxi community. The revolution of this new architecture of labor could even get sneakier. Between 2016 and 2017, a free and open source alternative to Uber quietly launched in San Francisco, California. LibreTaxi makes ridesharing affordable by getting rid of the third party between passengers and drivers. It then provides a taxi service that is not controlled by corporations but passengers, selfemployed drivers. What’s better is that it could be used by local people and benefits the locals without the taxation from either international co-op or local monopoly of taxiservice.

3.Leaning from steep steps, the rigorous beauty of Italian villages is repurposed, all for living, and living alone. Colonnata is just one of thousands of ghost hamlets thats silently dying in Italy. The phenomenon is not simply a consequence from earthquake, change of demographic pattern due to industry revolution or migration of young population to urban area seeking better economic opportunities. Looking at what happened in Riace, Italy where a continuous influx of refugees revived the fading population we can see a chance to sustain lives of dying villages. Governments control the border of state and restrict length of stay, legal working right for non-citizens to protect the rights of citizens. However, we need to question who actually benefits from this kind of built-in invisible wall in state architecture. Is it the non-citizen? Is it the citizen when there are roughly 6,000 extinct hamlets while another 15,000 hamlets already lost 90% of their residents in Italy’s case? Is it the government when it looses faith of its citizen in making the country better in terms of living condition or upward GDP revisions? If the answer is not any of the above, is it not reasonable or sane to redesign or simply re-imagine what could the system become? In the story of Uber and LibreTaxi we see a solid hack to the flawed societal system we are so accustomed to. The concept and operation of a peermatching network are so very effective and elegantly simple. It is amazing that it had never been used on a broad scale for publicly valued activity. A critical observation the polemical philosopher Ivan Illich made is that the elite professional groups have come to exert a “radical monopoly” on such basic human activities as health, agriculture, homebuilding, and learning. The result of much economic development is very often not flourishing human but modernized poverty, dependency, and an out-of-control system.4

People don’t work because they want to. They work because they have no other way to make money. They sell their time and energy to a boss in order to buy the things they need to survive. They specialize in different aspects of the work and repeat these tasks over and over again. Their time at work is not really part of their lives. It is dead time controlled by their boss and managers. What they get from work is enough money to pay for rent, food, beer—enough to keep them coming back to work. When they’ re not at work, they spend time traveling to or from work, preparing for work, resting up because they’ re exhausted from work or getting drunk to forget about work. The constant threat of unemployment is what keep them going to work everyday. Life seems like a kind of show we watch from the outside, but have no control over. 4

4.Without fear of wind or vertigo, the anarchists control the railway converted roads— the only infrastructure that links the hamlets— with self-driving GoogleCar. With its unofficial slogan “don’t be evil”, Google has made significant progress on providing universal access to high-intelligence technologies ranging from VR mapping to ground breaking invention like GoogleCar. When DeepMind made headlines in 2016 after AlphaGo—an artificial intelligence program— beat a world champion Go player, what we saw in the solemn face of Lee Sedol is not defeat but a lay-bare-without-suspicion respect to the opponent team. If the reality of present software intelligence can persuade a complex abstract strategy game player, how can we not embody the automation taking place in our cities? For instance, GoogleCar. Similar to Britain's right-to-buy scheme, in taxi industry there exists schemes like taxi driver reclaiming ownership of vehicle from the taxi company or letting agency. In this instance, the workers could operate the exact same job content independently from involvement of any third party. On the context of automated cars, the driver could actually own the self-operating taxi and receive a handsome sum of minimum income without investing any time or energy on the job. In another word, the eternally damed working class is free from work except occasional maintenance. In previous wave of automation, workers had the option of moving from routine jobs in one industry to routine jobs in another. We have to understand that most jobs can be broken down into series of routine tasks that can be performed by machines if the machine isn’t “smart” enough. When automated machines perform so much more economical, the threat of unemployment and better work/leisure balance becomes the critical points to reflect for our procedural re-designing of the present and coming city.

5.Looks down in the gathering people in history, Carrara’s anarchist heritage beseems as the mirror image of the ever-changing present. The double-identities these anarchist possessed is exactly like the status one possessed when he holds a dual-citizenship. On the one hand the anarchist had a working-class-ish job as a stone carver, on the other hand they held secret meetings as radical believers of anarchy. Dual-identities is not just a phenomenon about privileges involving investing and conducting business internationally. When gaps between the unnatural division created by states become obvious in the constant cultural exchange between nations, the legitimacy of state politics are rightly lost forever. What Ivan Illich envisioned about the extinction of institution and the disappearance of professions is seemingly vivid in the picture of hackable state structures. Another example for the phenomenon of interstate loophole is the notorious Shanzhai products. It is a term used to describe counterfeit consumer goods mass produced in Chinese sweatshop that circulate around the world. The literal meaning of Shanzhai means the mountain stockades of regional bandits far away from official control. 6.In a network of people that enlace at the undulating alps of Italian marble quarries, Travis can’t separate himself from the story of anarchy. Whether it is the bandit products in China or the workers in Italain mountain quarry does not matter in telling the story of Travis’s city anymore. Travis, like us, has been through a lot during the time travel from 1976 to 2029. Unlike the writer, me, who can only catch Pokemon on the tiny screen space of iphone6 alone the post-Brexit Bedford Square for recreational purpose, Travis has his AR contact lenses equipped on his unblinking eyes. I would’ve asked him what he is looking at if I could travel in time, in space. Personally as a future architect I would like my vehicle to have similar function like the car flying in Back to the Future. Aesthetically speaking, I would prefer the stunning helicopter in Jan Kaplicky’s house for a helicopter pilot.

At the end of the 19th century Carrara became the cradle of anarchism in Italy, in particular among the quarry workers. The quarry workers, including the stone carvers, had radical beliefs that set them apart from others. Ideas from outside the city began to influence the Carrarese. Anarchism and general radicalism became part of the heritage of the stone carvers. The Anarchist marble workers were also the driving force behind organising labour in the quarries and in the carving sheds. The International Federation of Anarchist was founded during an international anarchist conference at Carrara in 1968. The inclination of the workers to rebellion had long been proverbial, yet about twenty years ago the nature of quarries labor has undergone dramatic changes because the automation of marble production.5

7.In a network of people that intersect, people with different knowledge, background, travel back and forth, exchanging ideas, methods, and poetry.8.On the carpet of marble illuminated by the moon, a hut made out of marble is found, behind the sharp, cold wall of cavern, there are hundreds and hundreds more. 9.Around the emptied caverns, are the machines that mine the quarry, carve the stones, drive the cars, inside the sunless caverns, are the secret meetings of anarchist. The wheel of fortune, whether it means the mechanism of consumeristic capital, or the struggle between people and State, does not matter anymore. The spirit of Anarchy and Automation travel through time quietly, as it has always been among storytellers. The three lines of A are divided into the second, the minute, and the hour: Forever trapped in the clock in shape of circle, forever reminding us the once promised land of “Fortitudo Mea In Rota�. Dear readers, do you know anyone around thats wearing a watch? Or rather, do you?

WHAT CITY DOWN THERE AWAIT ITS END A FOR ANARCHY O FOR ROTA1 A CITY FOR MAN, WITHOUT THE MAN TURNING THE WHEEL. BEHIND THE HIGH ROCKS, THE AUTOMATED MACHINES TIRELESSLY PROCESSING THE CYCLE OF PRODUCTION, WHILE YOU HAVE A CHAT ABOUT WHAT YOU ARE GONNA DO TOMORROW.

Notes 1.Please see wikiHow to Go Back in Time for further interest on time traveling.http:// www.wikihow.com/Go-Back-in-Time 2.The story of the man and his memory, his hut, his city, his lover in the trio of journeys from “A as A Line, A wall and A Portal”, “D as Death, Duration, and Deconstruction” arrives in 2029. Part fiction, part fact, the project reimagines future now.

3.Please see “E as Event, Envelope and E=MC2” for discussion on “how to change the world”.

Footnote 1.Carrara is a city and comune in the Province of Massa and Carrara (Tuscany, Italy), notable for the white marble quarried there. Its motto is Fortitudo mea in rota.

2.A hommage to Italian writer Italo Cavino’s If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler 3.The paragraph is based on the original film script of Taxi Driver(1976) with little editing 4.The paragraph is based on historical Anarchist propaganda 5.The paragraph is based on material from a local guide tour at Carrara, Italy Images 0. Ancient Carrara map taken on site 1.In a Network of People that Intersect 2.On The Carpet of Marble Illuminated by The Moon 3.Around the Emptied Caverns 4.What City Down There Awaits Its End Reference Bey Hakim, The Temporary Autonomous Zone, 1991 Illich Ivan, Tools for Conviviality, 2001 Illich Ivan, Deschooling Society, 1995 Florida Richard, The Rise of the Creative Class, 2014 Jacobs Jane, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, 2000 Easterling Keller, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space, 2016 Huizinga Johan, Homo Ludens, 1938 Ford Henry, My Life and Work, 2009 Schmidt Eric, Rosenberg Jonathan, How Google Works, 2014 Herve-Gruyer Perrine, Herve-Gruyer Charles, Miraculous Abundance, 2016 Web Articles MacKinnon Eli, The Twilight of Shenzhen’s Great Urban Village, 2016 http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/09/16/china-demolition-economy-the-twilight-ofshenzhens-great-urban-village-baishizhou/ Huang Bunnie, Shenzhen’s Shanzhai designers, 2016 https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=284 Garland Eric, The Next Money: As the Big Economies Falter, Micro-Currencies Rise, 2012,https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/05/the-next-money-asthe-big-economies-falter-micro-currencies-rise/257216/ P2P Foundation, Open Source Villages, https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/