Utopian Trace

20 years on from the invention of the World Wide Web Dr Aleks Krotoski explores how it is reshaping almost every aspect of our lives. Joined by some of the web’s biggest names including the founders of Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft and the web’s inventor - she explores how far the web has lived up to its early promise.

The Web evolved into a powerful, ubiquitous tool because it was built on egalitarian principles and because thousands of individuals, universities and companies have worked, both independently and together as part of the World Wide Web Consortium, to expand its capabilities based on those principles. The Web as we know it, however, is being threatened in different ways. Some of its most successful inhabitants have begun to chip away at its principles. Large social-networking sites are walling off information posted by their users from the rest of the Web. Wireless Internet providers are being tempted to slow traffic to sites with which they have not made deals. Governments—totalitarian and democratic alike—are monitoring people’s online habits, endangering important human rights.

Gary Burns, Canada’s king of surreal comedy, joins journalist Jim Brown on an outing to the suburbs. Venturing into territory both familiar and foreign, they turn the documentary genre inside out, crafting a vivid account of life in The Late Suburban Age. Urban sprawl is eating the planet. Across the continent the landscape is being levelled - blasted clean of distinctive features and overlaid with zombie monoculture. Politicians call it growth. Developers call it business. The Moss family call it home. While Evan Moss zones out in commuter traffic, Ann boils over in her dream kitchen and the kids play sinister games amidst the fresh foundations of monster houses. A chorus of cultural prophets provide insight on the spectacle. James Howard Kunstler, author of The Geography of Nowhere, rails against the brutalizing aesthetic of strip malls. Philosopher Joseph Heath fears the soul-eating suburbs but admits they offer good value for money. And urban planner Beverly Sandalack dares to ask, Why can’t we walk anywhere anymore? Burns and Brown rummage through a toybox of cultural references, from Jane Jacobs to The Sopranos, to create a provocative reflection on why we live the way we do. Riffing off sitcoms and reality TV, they play fast and loose with a range of cinematic devices to consider what happens when cities get sick and mutate.

No public transport system can efficiently cope with low density. All the good systems in the world belong to dense cities; and none of the sparse cities has a good system. Public transport in large areas of low demand will always be structurally inefficient: services are infrequent, unconnected and far apart.

Have you ever travelled to another suburb, state or country and been dumbfounded by the amount of highrises in the outer CBD areas, then daydreamed about who lives there? Out My Window is the first feature length interactive documentary ever made, and explores the lives of those who inhabit highrise blocks across the world.

When we imagine what life will be like over the next century, many people worry how the rise of the East will affect our lives in the West. They need not bother: the reality is that by the year 2100 our planet will have changed out of all recognition and even the concept of East and West may be meaningless. In an interview in 2000, the economist Jeremy Rifkin suggested that: ‘Our way of life is likely to be more fundamentally transformed in the next several decades than in the previous thousand years.’

Eberthart Zrenner and colleagues at the University of Tübingen in Germany have developed a microchip carrying 1500 photosensitive diodes that slides into the retina where the photoreceptors would normally be. The diodes respond to light, and when connected to an outside power source through a wire into the eye, can stimulate the nearby nerves that normally pass signals to the brain, mimicking healthy photoreceptors.

Yes, that’s right! Team China bringin’ it home. In yesterday’s game of global technological dominance, the former underdog aced the U.S. on wind power, supercomputing, and, at the buzzer, manned space exploration. GOOOOOAAAAAL!