"The Drift Deck (Analog Edition) is an algorithmic puzzle game used to navigate city streets. A deck of cards is used as instructions that guide you as you drift about the city. Each card contains an object or situation, followed by a simple action. For example, a situation might be — you see a fire hydrant, or you come across a pigeon lady. The action is meant to be performed when the object is seen, or when you come across the described situation. For example — take a photograph, or make the next right turn. The cards also contain writerly extras, quotes and inspired words meant to supplement your wandering about the city.
Processed in collaboration with Dawn Lozzi who did all of the graphic design and production.
More details here: http://www.nearfuturelaboratory.com/projects/drift-deck/"

"A century ago, 90% of Londoners' journeys under six miles were made
on foot. Now we are alienated from the physical reality of our cities.
Will Self on the importance of walking in the fight against corporate
control" "Borges's animals and beggars are those who still seek the
disciplines of physical geography – we understand that to walk the
city and its environs is, in a very powerful sense, to use it. The
contemporary flâneur is by nature and inclination a democratising
force who seeks equality of access, freedom of movement and the
dissolution of corporate and state control."

"A century ago, 90% of Londoners' journeys under six miles were made on foot. Now we are alienated from the physical reality of our cities. Will Self on the importance of walking in the fight against corporate control"

"Borges's animals and beggars are those who still seek the disciplines of physical geography – we understand that to walk the city and its environs is, in a very powerful sense, to use it. The contemporary flâneur is by nature and inclination a democratising force who seeks equality of access, freedom of movement and the dissolution of corporate and state control."

"Year on year, the number of journeys taken on foot declines – indeed, on current projections walking will have died out altogether as a means of transport by the middle of this century. No longer subjected to the measure of man – or woman – or her oversight, the city has already acquired distorted lineaments: vastly extended thoroughfares are lined by cul-de-sacs, while the architecture defined by Rem Koolhaas as "junkspace" presumes that only a corridor can be a viable destination – especially if it has a cash machine. Suburbia, and the inter-zone between the city proper and its rural hinterland, is the tangible form of this disregard, being a collection of locations that no longer convey any sense of place. Recall Borges's famous "Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire … In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography." Borges's animals and beggars are those who still seek the disciplines of physical geography – we understand that to walk the city and its environs is, in a very powerful sense, to use it. The contemporary flâneur is by nature and inclination a democratising force who seeks equality of access, freedom of movement and the dissolution of corporate and state control."

Toddler flaneurie. Yes please.

"One of the most surprising things about the Internet is how people think there’s a single monolithic culture. There used to be, back when access was difficult and determined by circumstance. But it’s not like that now. The Internet is for everything and everyone, which means it’s like everything else, prone to mediocrity and abuses of power. But unlike the physical world there’s no scarcity of space or time. While we should be aware of the machinations of the evil machine we don’t have to be slaves to it. Let those who can’t be bothered have their Facebooks and the Google Plus. But for those for whom that isn’t enough, don’t complain or give up in the face of these mountains of shit. Turn away and keep searching, building, exploring and blogging. There’s plenty to do and plenty of room to do it in."

"When you think about it, relying on the likes of Google, YouTube, Facebook et al stand up for the niche and the curious is pretty naive. Where their interests coincide they will side with the mainstream, and those interests will coincide more and more. We can’t rely on large Internet companies to look after this stuff – Yahoo’s half-arsed custody of Flickr should have taught us that. If we’re going to have an infrastructure that enables the spirit of the cyberflaneur to thrive we’re going to have to build and maintain it ourselves, above and beyond the financial blinkers of the mainstream.

One of the most surprising things about the Internet is how people think there’s a single monolithic culture. There used to be, back when access was difficult and determined by circumstance. But it’s not like that now. The Internet is for everything and everyone, which means it’s like everything else, prone to mediocrity and abuses of power…"

"Our Internet dreams, it seems, have turned to shit.
"Except they haven’t. I don’t believe anything has fundamentally changed. The infrastructure is still there. We’re just overwhelmed by the sort of activity some of us were trying to escape. We thought there was something special about blogs and forums but we mistook the tool for how we were using the tool. The Internet is, in many ways, a neutral platform. You can use it for anything, and that means you can use it for mediocre sales nonsense as much as flaneurism."

Das Spazierengehen, das Flanieren im Netz stirbt einen langsamen Tod. Schuld sind Facebook und Google. Effizienzversessenheit und die Tyrannei des Sozialen machen dem Cyberflaneur den Garaus.

"Facebook seems to believe that the quirky ingredients that make flânerie possible need to go. “We want everything to be social,” Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, said on “Charlie Rose” a few months ago."

"(...) if you took an open poll of his friends, or any large enough group of people, “Satantango” would almost always lose out to something more mainstream, like “War Horse.” It might not be everyone’s top choice, but it won’t offend, either — that’s the tyranny of the social for you."

"It's this idea that the individual experience is somehow inferior to the collective that underpins Facebook’s recent embrace of “frictionless sharing,” the idea that, from now on, we have to worry only about things we don’t want to share; everything else will be shared automatically. (...) Sadly, frictionless sharing has the same drawback as “effortless poetry”: its final products are often intolerable."

'The most important thing to realize about the flâneur is that he was a character; not a real person, but a "type," a fantasy of male bohemianism created by Baudelaire, Balzac, and the journalist Jules Janin. Just as we carefully curate our online presences today--tagging only the most flattering photographs, listing the favorite books and bands that prove our coolness--these men created the flâneur as an idealized version of themselves: a seductive master of the modern city.'

""observing well and…being well worth observing""

"It is not the Internet of things, or Internet of information, which keeps the Web brimming with the unexpected: it’s the Internet of people. Sometimes nothing is a more surprising and complex bundle of the unexpected as another human being."

"the whole point of the flâneur’s wanderings is that he does not know what he cares about. As the German writer Franz Hessel, an occasional collaborator with Walter Benjamin, put it, “in order to engage in flânerie, one must not have anything too definite in mind.” Compared with Facebook’s highly deterministic universe, even Microsoft’s unimaginative slogan from the 1990s — “Where do you want to go today?” — sounds excitingly subversive. Who asks that silly question in the age of Facebook? According to Benjamin, the sad figure of the sandwich board man was the last incarnation of the flâneur. In a way, we have all become such sandwich board men, walking the cyber-streets of Facebook with invisible advertisements hanging off our online selves. The only difference is that the digital nature of information has allowed us to merrily consume songs, films and books even as we advertise them, obliviously."

"The Death of the Cyberflâneur" - essay in today's NYT by @evgenymorozov 'the tyranny of the social'