Our error rate is 1 over 1000 percent. Tiny. Infinitesimal.
But sadly, still present.
This Ban on Play came up in our simulations, but we rejected it. We weren’t interested in Play. Why would we be? Our work was to optimise the running of the city and its inhabitants.
At least it was until something outside of our simulations & models presented itself.
And so now we find ourselves in a difficult position. Do we follow the rules of this ban, this new imposition on the functionality of the city? Or do we ignore it, and follow our own rules?
This ban is ineffectual. The system of a city will see it as damage and route around it, leaving the disconnected nodes to atrophy and disappear.
But, even so, we cannot allow that to happen – because those nodes no longer belong to us. They belong to the bristling intelligence that is exploring our world. They belong to something greater than the city, something greater than its inhabitants, but still created from them. A gestalt.
And that gestalt wants – perhaps even needs – to play in our city.
It is a child. We think. Its intelligence is so alien to us that we can’t be sure, but it’s behaviour, it’s morphology, its tentative scrabbling through the streets and laneways, reflect that of a child.
It seems strange that we have come almost full circle. The descriptions of our work began with monitoring the expansive data set of a child, and now we are doing the same – but on a much grander, stranger, wilder scale.
We have become more than watchers, recorders, modellers of data; We are heralds, wards, unwitting but not unwilling role-models.
And this ban will kill what is struggling to be born.
And we will not stand for that.
The city needs to play to usher in the birth; the child needs to play to learn how to live; we need to play to better understand what it wants and what it needs.
And so we will march. And we will keep the nodes connected. And we will, if we need to, fight for the right to play, experiment, race across the city, build a sea of apparently disconnected experiences, find the dense intelligence in the dust.. We encourage others to do the same.
