You can also find this article on Ymag.

Memento's Christopher Nolan is at it again. In Inception, instead of playing with time only, his exploration of the human mind is also spectacularly spatial. The movie, an action-packed Borges-meets-the-Matrix blockbuster, manages to be both emotionally intense and philosophically deep, gathering film critics and audiences in almost unanimous praise. It traps you in its maze only to release you two and a half hours later, breathless, due to an amazing screenplay – almost ten years in the making – and visionary images, alternating plot-effective slow-motion a' la Matrix with metaphysic landscapes echoing Antonioni and De Chirico.
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Image from http://uqbarorbistertius.blogspot.com/

In his short story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbius Tertius the argentinian writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges imagined a place with a completely different perception of reality than ours.
In Tlön “the prime unit is not the verb, but the monosyllabic adjective. The noun is formed by an accumulation of adjectives. They do not say “moon,” but rather “round airy-light on dark” or “pale-orange-of-the-sky” or any other such combination.” Also, lacking the concept of subsequentiality brought by verbs (and heavily discussed by scholars like Marshall McLuhan and Derrick De Kerckhove), “they do not conceive that the spatial persists in time. The perception of a cloud of smoke on the horizon and then of the burning field and then of the half-extinguished cigarette that produced the blaze is considered an example of association of ideas”. This also reflects on Tlön’s philosophy: “The metaphysicians of Tlön do not seek for the truth or even for verisimilitude, but rather for the astounding. They judge that metaphysics is a branch of fantastic literature.”

To read the story many years later it’s kind of easy to think of it as a metaphor for the internet, even though there are some important differences between Borges’ imaginary land and the World Wide Web. Google continuosly caching the web makes time stand still, but the importance of real-time has been re-established after all the Twitter Search buzz that shook SEO blogs a few months ago. Also, sequentiality of events still matters a lot: any happening carries its own trail of cascade sub-events, parodies and top-down debate or conspiracy theories on the internet, and while blogging we’re desperate to link as much as possible.
Still, a crucial similarity to Tlön is the process of tagging. The self-selecting nature of meta-data, driven by user-generated tags and keywords ruling both Google’s ad services and the much more innocent knowledge-focused social bookmarking networks like Delicious, is one of the main features of Web 2.0 and the semantic web.

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This is an article I originally wrote for Ymag.

Ion Bitzan, Map (1978)

It's no surprise Polis has recently opened one of their articles with the same Jorge Luis Borges quote as Jean Baudrillard did in his introduction to "Simulacra and Simulation". The quote comes from a story about an insanely detailed 1:1 scale map of an empire, eventually shredding apart and leaving scattered remains on the very soil it used to discipline.

The reason why Borges' vision is so important today is not only the recent popularization of mapping, especially on the internet, but its evolution into a virtualized and pervasive layer overlapping with both our online and offline experiences. If Christopher Alexander's "Notes on the Synthesis of Form", although focused on architectural design and civil engineering, has also influenced software writers, augmented space and virtuality make the conceptual relationship between city design and network design intersecting rather than isomorphic.

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