J.G. Ballard: Chronopolis – Time Cities and the Lost Future about:reader?url=https://socialecologies.wordpress.com/2015...

socialecologies.wordpress.com

J.G. Ballard: Chronopolis – Time

Cities and the Lost Future
17-22 minutos

Continuing from where I left off J.G. Ballard: Chrontopia and

Post-Consumerist Society.
Ballard in his short story Chronopolis will envision a world where
Time as Clock-time has been outlawed. In this short story he takes
us through the history of one particular Time-City, Chronopolis
where every facet of peoples existence was ruled by time and its
measurements. We first meet Conrad Newman in the free worlds
beyond the great and ruinous Time City, who is awaiting trial for
his criminal heresies: he has brought the great central clock, the
symbol of absolute regulatory control back online.
We discover from a friend of his Stacey that
‘Thirty million people once lived in this city,’ Stacey remarked.
‘Now the population is little more than two, and still declining.
Those of us left hang on in what were once the distal suburbs, so
that the city today is effectively an enormous ring, five miles in
width, encircling a vast dead centre forty or fifty miles in
diameter.’1
As Stacy drives Newman around the Time City now in various

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stages of ruination he tells him it has been thirty-seven years to the

day since the great central clock upon which all other clocks were
synchronized stopped at 12:01 exactly. Conrad Newman is so taken
with the beauty of this now dusty and ruinous city that when he
comes upon an architectural landscape of buildings that seem so
pristine and perfect he asks:
‘It’s impressive, all right. The people who lived here must have
been giants. What’s really remarkable is that it looks as if they left
only yesterday. Why don’t we go back?’ ‘Well, apart from the fact
that there aren’t enough of us now, even if there were we couldn’t
control it. In its hey-day this city was a fantastically complex social
organism. The communications problems are difficult to imagine
merely by looking at these blank façades. It’s the tragedy of this
city that there appeared to be only one way to solve them.’
(Ballard, p. 159)
Conrad will ask how they solved the issue of travel,
communication, etc. Stacy tells him that the solution came about
by the simple notion of leaving themselves out of the equation:
‘Did they solve them?’ ‘Oh, yes, certainly. But they left themselves
out of the equation. Think of the problems, though. Transporting
fifteen million office workers to and from the centre every day,
routeing in an endless stream of cars, buses, trains, helicopters,
linking every office, almost every desk, with a videophone, every
apartment with television, radio, power, water, feeding and
entertaining this enormous number of people, guarding them with
ancillary services, police, fire squads, medical units – it all hinged
on one factor.’ (Ballard, p. 159)
What was the factor? Stacey will tell him:
‘Time! Only by synchronizing every activity, every footstep forward
or backward, every meal, bus-halt and telephone call, could the
organism support itself. Like the cells in your body, which
proliferate into mortal cancers if allowed to grow in freedom, every
individual here had to subserve the overriding needs of the city or
fatal bottlenecks threw it into total chaos. You and I can turn on
the tap any hour of the day or night, because we have our own
private water cisterns, but what would happen here if everybody
washed the breakfast dishes within the same ten minutes?’
(Ballard, p. 159)
Conrad will discover that the in the Time City every man, woman,
and child was regulated moment by moment by time, by the
intervals in each second, minute, hour down to even the time

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allotted for sleep, eating, speaking, making love, playing with their
children. It was also based on a sophisticated set of color codes
and decodings:
‘There were a dozen socio-economic categories: blue for
executives, gold for professional classes, yellow for military and
government officials – incidentally, it’s odd your parents ever got
hold of that wristwatch, none of your family ever worked for the
government – green for manual workers and so on. But, naturally,
subtle subdivisions were possible. The lower-grade executive I
mentioned left his office at 12, but a senior executive, with exactly
the same time codes, would leave at 11.45, have an extra fifteen
minutes, would find the streets clear before the lunch-hour rush of
clerical workers.’ (Ballard, p. 161)
After a thorough visit through the Time City Conrad will come to
the center and see the great clock itself, asking:
‘Why did it stop?’ he asked. Stacey looked at him curiously.
‘Haven’t I made it fairly plain?’
Scarcity. The highly regulated and over organized populace was
bound to resource scarcity, and the only way they could all share in
its wealth was through absolute command and control of the
resources, of which they were both victims and rulers. The whole
point is recursitivity: the insertion of the human agent back into
the Time Loop of the Regulatory System. Without this massive
regulation of the human agent within the technological system that
kept the running in perfect stasis: a negentropic machine, a
perpetual motion machine bound to the cycles and rhythms not of
organic life but of Time itself and its endless cycles or regulation
and mathematic surplus the whole system would break down and
dissolve.
As Stacy comes to the end of his story he explains to Conrad that
there came a time when people rebelled:
‘Eventually, of course, revolt came. It’s interesting that in any
industrial society there is usually one social revolution each
century, and that successive revolutions receive their impetus from
progressively higher social levels. In the eighteenth century it was
the urban proletariat, in the nineteenth the artisan classes, in this
revolt the white collar office worker, living in his tiny so-called
modern flat, supporting through credit pyramids an economic
system that denied him all freedom of will or personality, chained
him to a thousand clocks . . .’ (Ballard, p. 162)

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What’s humorous in this is that the metaphor itself: “revolution” is

bound to natural cyclic time systems: late 14c., originally of
celestial bodies, from Old French revolucion “course, revolution
(of celestial bodies)” (13c.), or directly from Late Latin
revolutionem (nominative revolutio) “a revolving,” noun of action
from past participle stem of Latin revolvere “turn, roll back”. The
sense that one could roll back time, return to some previous time,
a time of pure time before Time as clock-time began its merciless
regulatory infestation. But why have we been bound to periodic
revolutions or roll-backs? Is the pressure of this regulatory system
of a hypercapitalist technotopia acting like the clock mechanism
itself? Does it from time to time need to be rewound? A new
winding, a rejuvenation and resetting of its basic mechanisms to
zero: a sort of festival of the Null Point, an Omega point of return
and turning that escapes the boundaries of actual Time. A release
from the strict rules of time-bound regulation? In this sense the
time-between-times when societies held carnivals and topsy-turvy
reversals of roles, when leaders stepped down and clowns became
Kings? (Think of Vico, Joyce, Norman O. Brown….)

Smart Cities

Think on this: Are we not now building the infrastructure for such
a computational world of regulated bodies, a cognitariat that is
nothing more than a mere machine, a member of the machinic
phylum connected and plugged in to the intensive networks of a
Time City that regulates every aspect of their existence in work and
play. With the various Smart City initiatives around the planet
which are only models of the future, rather than the future itself,
or we not seeing the instigation of a 24/7 Society based on total
temporal command and control. One that eventually will replace
humans with robots and advanced AI?
Listen to this blurb for a Sino-Singapore Smart City of the Future:

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Sino-Singapore Guangzhou Knowledge City (SSGKC) will be a

Smart City, integrating urban management systems, powered by
leading information and telecommunication technologies which
will drive sustainable economic growth, a high quality of life, and
effective management of natural resources. … The Smart City will
also provide an excellent test bed for leading edge technologies.
SSGKC will exploit Next Generation Information and
Communication Technology (ICT), cloud computing, and the
Internet of Things (IoT) to develop a world class city where
residents can live and work in a safe, efficient and resource-
efficient environment. The government administration will
leverage on ICT technology to optimise the services delivery to
residents and enterprises.
You will notice the phrasing: “safe”, “efficient”, “resource-efficient
environment”, “leverage”, “optimize”, “services”… etc. The notion
of ICT technologies as the new underpinning of this whole
enterprise system and its society. And, above all, “government
administration”: the top-down command and control of every
facet of this world for you, an invisible network of administrators
all attuned to providing you an information rich environment
filled with the latest technologies, entertainment, 24/7 onlife
paradise. What else would you need? – One wonders where
murder and mayhem play into this new technological paradise?
The breakdown between public and  private, the boundaries of the
individual will dissolve since security will prevail: safety-first, the
ultimate in sociality… the new citizen as a networked netizen or
Inforg (Informational Organism) whose life and mind is never
private, but always connected to the Grid.
I kept thinking of my first visit to Disneyland as a child. My visit to
Tomorrowland with all its gadgets, wonders, technological
advances, etc. Then I look back at what it offered in some of the
pictures in a book on that period, and how unrealistic their
expectations were during the 1950’s and 60’s. It’s as if these
companies truly want us to build new City States where the
nouveau riche, the cognitariat and elite corporate executives will
live their lives out in a Disneyfied technological environment of
pure bliss and creativity. Technological sublime in its extreme
mode of Utopian expectation.
Like many things that the great corporate think tanks, global
banks, national and international regimes buy into is this notion of
a technological imperative: as if technology will be the solution to
their most pressing problems. And, for most advanced

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hypercapitalist societies and economies its about how to control

the populace in such a way to gain every last drop of work and
profit it can from them. As for the excluded and the non-workers?
Their just shadow figures in a deflationary economics of scarcity,
part of the drift of expendables and trash stocks that go without
being said.
Yet, as such grand schemes for InfoSpheric cities becomes an
options we should listen to some of the designers and engineers,
such as Adam Greenfield, who in Against the smart city tells us –
speaking of the various problems that the new technology faces:
There’s just no such thing as “an” interactive smart wall or “an”
iris-recognition system, any more than there is “a” bike-sharing
scheme or personal rapid-transit network. What do exist in the
world are specific deployments of components from specific
vendors, laminated together as particular propositions, and each
of these may differ profoundly from other, similar propositions,
along all of the axes that condition human interaction with them.
It’s all but impossible to fairly evaluate claims about the
performance of systems like these without knowing just what it is
that’s being suggested. Information-technological components
may certainly be modular and interoperable, in other words, but
the systems built from them are not at all fungible.2
“Several decades from now cities will have countless autonomous,
intelligently functioning IT systems that will have perfect
knowledge of users’ habits and energy consumption, and provide
optimum service… The goal of such a city is to optimally regulate
and control resources by means of autonomous IT systems. –
Siemens”
As Greenfield will suggest companies like Siemens, IBM, Cisco,
and various other Smart City proponents are gearing up the hype
and transitioning their core philosophical and corporate policies
toward fulfilling this promise:
What we encounter in this statement is an unreconstructed logical
positivism, which, among other things, implicitly holds that the
world is in principle perfectly knowable, its contents enumerable
and their relations capable of being meaningfully encoded in the
state of a technical system, without bias or distortion. As applied to
the affairs of cities, it is effectively an argument there is one and
only one universal and transcendently correct solution to each
identified individual or collective human need; that this solution
can be arrived at algorithmically, via the operations of a technical

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system furnished with the proper inputs; and that this solution is
something which can be encoded in public policy, again without
distortion. (Greenfield, KL 442)
Greenfield will tell us that underpinning the basic assumption of
most of the grand narratives and corporate hype is a specific
hypothesis about both the future and human behavior. The first
deals with the notion of complexity itself. Most of these companies
reason that contemporary urban environment is so complex and
so vexatious in its demands that no group of ordinary, unaided
human beings can hope to understand it, let alone manage it
wisely. Therefore the new Intelligent InfoSphere will need a new
class of intelligent workers to maintain and reliably oversee the
smooth operation of the systems, while at the same time enforcing
the rules and regulations that bind the InfoSphere citizens to its
regulatory system. Next will be the truth that the cognitariat and
elite themselves cannot be entrusted with this task. As he states it:
 Though it’s garbed for the moment in the seductive language of
efficiency, agility and sustainability, we might as well call that
current for what it is: the impulse toward authoritarianism, and
the will to control over other human beings. This impulse is
something that springs eternal in the human heart, no matter what
language or technology it is couched in. It can be suppressed or
defanged locally and temporarily, but it will surely burst forth
again in a different guise, in a different time and place. The smart
city happens to be the aspect in which we confront it in our time.
(Greenfield, 1451)
So already the bottom line is these cities of the future will have as
their founding principles a set of in-built perimeters based on
command and control of both the Smart City itself as a system,
and of the populace that presides and uses its services. As one
ethicist will admit this world has been slow in coming but is
speeding up, accelerating toward a future that is shaping and
colonizing us through the hypermediation of advertising,
corporate pressure, political and social disruption and chaos,
setting the stage for our migration to a fully secured electronic
paradise that will offer us every material advantage. The only thing
it will ask of us is that we give up our freedom. As Floridia will
state it ICTs are as much re-ontologizing our world as they are
creating new realities. The threshold between here (analogue,
carbon-based, offline) and there (digital, silicon-based, online) is
fast becoming blurred, but this is as much to the advantage of the
latter as it is to the former. Adapting Horace’s famous phrase,

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‘captive infosphere is conquering its victor’, the digital-online is

spilling over into the analogue-offline and merging with it. This
recent phenomenon is variously known as ‘Ubiquitous
Computing’, ‘Ambient Intelligence’, ‘The Internet of Things’, or
‘Web-augmented Things’. I prefer to refer to it as the onlife
experience. It is, or will soon be, the next stage in the development
of the information age. With a slogan: hyperhistory happens
onlife.3
For Floridi the greatest problem is the coming informational
divide: the bifurcation between those who can be denizens of the
infosphere and those who cannot, between insiders and outsiders,
between information rich and information poor. It will redesign
the map of worldwide society, generating or widening
generational, geographic, socio-economic, and cultural divides. Yet
the gap will not be reducible to the distance between rich and poor
countries, since it will cut across societies. Pre-historical cultures
have virtually disappeared, with the exception of some small tribes
in remote corners of the world. The new divide will be between
historical and hyperhistorical ones. We might be preparing the
ground for tomorrow’s informational slums. (The Ethics of
Information, p. 9)
Ballard for his part leaves us with time ticking in his anti-hero’s
ear. His smart city, the time city, with its fully regulated
codifications of life bound to its central clock against which the
Order of Domination it objectified has become the symbol of the
failed and lost future, a liminal zone of horror and static ruination
teasing us with its perfect symmetries and angular worlds of light
and sun. As Conrad is sitting in his cubicle he begins to chuckle as
he realizes there is clock in his prison cell (one of the officers will
tell him that they had to reinstall them to help the prisoners from
going totally insane). After two weeks in isolation in this cell we
hear Conrad “still chuckling over the absurdity of it all … later …
he noticed the clock’s insanely irritating tick . . .” (Ballard, p. 168)
As our masters continue to build the great future pyramids of the
new millennial cities of the coming Global InfoSphere let us be
reminded of that “irritating tick…”. Tick toc, tick toc, tick toc….
The Sentient City: Corporate Governance and Innovation
Smart Cities of the Future: Infosphere, Inforgs, and
Technoutopianism
The Ecumenopolis: Panic Cities of Stupidity or Intelligence?

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Nick Land and Teleoplexy – The Schizoanalysis of Acceleration

1, Ballard, J. G. (2012-06-01). The Complete Stories of J. G.
Ballard (p. 156). Norton. Kindle Edition.
2. Greenfield, Adam (2013-12-20). Against the smart city (The city
is here for you to use) (Kindle Locations 412-417). Do projects.
Kindle Edition.
3. Floridi, Luciano (2013-10-10). The Ethics of Information (p. 8).
Oxford University Press, USA. Kindle Edition.

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