The message is clear. Nowhere escapes the net. A map of all the webs passing through any particular space would be impossibly dense. Invisible networks seemingly threaten visible means of defining space, dissolving the walls of buildings. The architecture of borders, walls, doors, and locks gives way to that of passwords, fire walls, public key encryption, and security certificates. Indeed, the idea of a space occupied by networks or superimposed by them has been replaced by that of overlapping networks within which physical space only appears as a fragile artifact or effect. Space itself can only be seen when caught in the net. It is as if the modern perforation and lightening up of architecture in the face of speed, industrialized technology, and mass production at the turn of the twentieth century has gone a step farther as buildings dissolve into information flow, to be either discarded as a relic of a previous time or nostalgically preserved as a quaint memento.

The internet (...) now bounces from school to house to car to plane to beach. But what if we are actually at the end point of the network logic? What if contemporary discourse about the net simply realizes nineteenth-century fantasies that were acted throughout most of the last century? What if the much advertised dissolving of architecture occurred long ago? What if much our net talk is just an echo? An echo of an echo.

Text: Mark Wigley in: Buckminster Fuller Inc., Architecture in the Age of Radio, Zürich 2015