South Side streets, micromobility misfires, e-bike discourse

For the entirety of the past year East Carson Street – the central corridor through Pittsburgh’s South Side – has been undergoing a slow and stymying overhaul. The construction project has involved street closures, blocked sidewalks, and haphazardly reconfigured intersection crossings (I previously chronicled my own frustrations with mobility in the neighborhood). Supposedly the project is finally drawing to a close, although a basic visual survey of the streetscape suggests that a significant amount of work remains to be done. Street paving operations, one of the final stages of the project, were recently shifted from overnight hours to the daytime due to harassment of workers. Prior to the re-paving the street was jackhammered and stripped down to the underlying stone (I’m actually not sure if these are considered cobblestones or setts).

I read an unsubstantiated claim on the Pittsburgh subreddit saying that the Carson Street project was being overseen by PennDOT instead of the city Department of Public Works as a cost-saving measure, and as such the overall approach and materials used are typical of highway maintenance rather than street repair. I have no idea if this is accurate but it might explain why the current state of Carson Street is such a motley mix of materials and surfaces. Frankly, the redesigned streetcorners and placement of new utility posts along the sidewalk suggest an ignorance of fundamental pedestrian use and mobility.

Meanwhile, Miami-based micromobility startup Bolt Mobility abruptly ceased services in a number of U.S. cities this summer. A Tech Crunch article considered the broader implications for a depopulating micromobility market.

In a Time editorial published last month, Paris Marx (author of the recently published Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong about the Future of Transportation) scrutinizes the myopic mobility visions of Elon Musk:

“Elon Musk has wielded a virtual monopoly on how we think about the future, but will his visions really deliver better lives for most people in our society? For all the tech industry’s talk of ‘disruption,’ keeping us all trapped in cars for decades into the future by equipping them with batteries or upgraded computers doesn’t feel like much of a revolution.”

Over the years this blog has referenced writings by Ian Bogost, typically on issues relating to technology or video games. Bogost recently penned a new piece on technology, this time tackling the e-bike. People have dogpiled on the article on Twitter already so I don’t want to recapitulate those responses here, but without even getting into the potential merits of the essay’s sentiments it’s easily the lamest writing I’ve personally seen from Bogost.

“Perhaps my e-bike ambivalence comes in part from the bike’s strange social status. An e-bike isn’t cheap—the least expensive ones are about $1,000, and they go up to $5,000 or more. But the symbolic value one receives in exchange is minimal. Spending five large on a conventional bike would get you a status symbol—you’d come off as a cyclist for sure. For that matter, spending that dough on a Vespa would infuse you with an Aperol-tinged Italianate cool. You’d want to be seen arriving on your moped. But I don’t want anybody seeing me on my e-bike. It’s just kind of embarrassing.”

Anyway, Vice writer Aaron Gordon penned a response piece arguing that America does indeed have an “e-bike problem,” but it’s not one of those identified by Bogost:

“E-bikes do have a big problem in the U.S., one that I have been increasingly concerned about as someone who very much advocates for e-bikes and wants to see them take off in this country. It is related to Bogost’s point that e-bikes don’t quite fit with any American identity, but in a much more—literally—concrete way. E-bikes don’t belong anywhere in particular on American infrastructure, which makes them both more frustrating, more dangerous, and more annoying than they otherwise could be. And it’s unnecessarily generating friction between traditional cyclists and e-bikers despite their obvious shared interests in repurposing street space from automobiles.”

Writing at Streets Blog USA, Kea Wilson focuses in on Bogost’s fixation with the “symbolic value” of the e-bike in comparison to other modes of transportation:

“Two-wheeled transportation has been cast not just as the purview of the “twee,” the “jerks,” or the “pathetic losers,” but, variously, of the middle-aged man in Lycra and the snot-nosed kid, the gentrifying hipster and the lazy poor person, the scofflaw stoplight runner and the insufferable nerd who’s holding up traffic and deserves to be mowed down by motorists with important places to be. And to be fair, even among bike advocates, cycling can too easily be stereotyped as a silver-bullet solution to some of society’s most enduring problems; it’s what Dr. Melody Hoffman calls a “rolling signifier” that can easily morph into or a scapegoat, or a superhero, or something else entirely, depending on who’s looking and what their agenda is.”

Incidentally, I had my first e-bike experience just last week, riding a POGOH electric-assist cycle back home along the river trail. It was fun and even thrilling, but it did feel uncomfortably overpowered for the bike path. However I’m eager to try one out on the uphill commute into Oakland.

L.A's 6th Street Bridge, startup shutdowns, bumpy roads

Last month the city of Los Angeles celebrated the opening of the new 6th Street Viaduct bridge. The new structure replaces the original 6th Street bridge, an iconic landmark that spanned the L.A. river, connected downtown to Boyle Heights, and appeared in numerous films and other media. The original bridge was constructed in 1932 and demolished in 2016 due to structural problems.

The fanfare around the viaduct’s opening was quickly replaced by media coverage of illegal activity and street takeovers bringing traffic across the span to a standstill. In addition to reported road races, spinouts, and wheelie exhibitions, the new bridge was soon employed for a variety of unintended uses:

Video on social media from last weekend showed drivers spinning their wheels and performing other antics on the bridge, leaving the pavement scarred. Some people even crawled onto the ribbon-like arches that line the bridge to get elevated views of the action. Other isolated incidents have included a man getting a haircut in the middle of the bridge last Wednesday and another shadow boxing while wearing a red cape.

Reading about the commotion – and the flurry of responses – from afar, I was tempted to catch a flight to L.A. for a first-person perspective of the proceedings before the proposed preventive measures could be implemented (I had to settle for visiting the virtual ghost of the original bridge in Grand Theft Auto V, see photo above). The new 6th Street Viaduct, the disputes over its utilization, and the discourse around the controversy represent a confluence of urban communication issues. In the first month of its opening, the bridge has supported a communicative convergence of contrasting visions of city form and function.

On one hand is the bridge as symbol, as a medium for communicating urban identity and values. In response to the “unruly” behavior overtaking the new viaduct Los Angeles city council member Kevin de León highlighted the bridge’s symbolic function as an iconic landmark communicating an elite cosmopolitan status:

He predicted the bridge would become as famous as Griffith Park Observatory and Venice Beach. “We do have a new star in town,” he said. “It’s something all Angelenos deserve. This would be a symbolic icon for not just the region ... but for the entire world.”

This perspective attests to the role of iconic architecture (or “starchitecture”) for communicating urban distinction and “world city” status, as well as acting as lightning rods for attracting additional investment. But other Angelenos see the new bridge as symbolic of the attendant processes of gentrification. As stated in one community organizer’s account:

I begin to explain once again that the new Sixth Street Bridge Project is often hated for the wrong reasons. Though mostly because many people are quite convinced that this new bridge is a symbol of gentrification and displacement of a culture-rich community. And its hard to see how not to get that impression, given the characteristics of this project and the inequity in the end results.

From this perspective the viaduct is not merely a route for moving traffic between downtown and Boyle Heights but is a corridor for carrying capital into new extractive territories.

Beyond the bridge’s symbolic status as communication medium, the material form of the viaduct also functions as an infrastructure, not only for traversal but for expression. The aforementioned councilmember de León has targeted graffiti on the new bridge, asking the city council to allocate additional funds for graffiti removal.

The proposal to clean up graffiti passed 3-1 after De Leon and San Fernando Valley area City Councilman John Lee got into a debate, with Lee saying that spending that kind of money downtown takes funding away from other districts in Los Angeles that are trying to clean up their own local graffiti.

De León’s comments advocating for residents to take “collective responsibility as stewards of the bridge” moved beyond graffiti to the range of behaviors by which individuals were using the bridge to get their fifteen minutes of fame:

De León urged people to “step up and do everything within our power to make sure that we don’t allow a small group of individuals that are looking for their virtual fame to go viral on Instagram, TikTok or Facebook or Twitter — whatever it may be, for them to hijack the bridge that ultimately, at the end of the day, is the people’s bridge. This bridge belongs to everybody.”

There’s a lot to unpack here. De León’s emphasis on collective responsibility and assertion that “the bridge belongs to everybody” are ripe for analysis, but in the particular context of graffiti I can’t help but think of Richard Sennett. Sennett’s prolific career of urbanist writings began with the influential articulation of the “uses of disorder” for city life. In later writings Sennett addressed graffiti with a somewhat ambivalent attitude (to my reading anyway) that viewed it as a form of private address indifferent to the general urban public, and expression of an “aggressive” relation to the environment.

But De León also references the role of mediation in drawing crowds to the bridge, particularly the influence of social media. In our mediated era the opening of a new urban landmark offers an occasion not only for individual exploration but for seizing the novel infrastructure as a platform for creating “content” to add to the endlessly circulating stream of online images. The ever proliferating ways in which urban environments are mediated represent a wrinkle in Sennett’s theories of disorder and individual expression, as social media participation has incentivized new ways of relating to the urban environment.

A letter to the editor published in the July 27th Los Angeles Times shifted blame for the bridge chaos away from the unruly individuals taking over the traverse to the designers of the new viaduct who “forgot to include human beings” in their plans:

The resulting design was full of what engineers call “affordances” — design aspects that vividly suggest how an object or space should be used. They invite (afford) an almost inevitable human response: An elevator button affords you to push it, a chair’s design affords you to sit on it (or avoid it), and wide-open lanes afford teenage boys the irresistible impulse to drag-race.

The letter writer is evincing a perspective of spatial determinism that closely accords with Keller Easterling’s writings on medium design, and echoes insights of many antecedent urbanists. The same day the letter was published the Times editorial board issued a statement that expressed similar sentiments:

Instead, focus on the crowds of pedestrians, cyclists, skateboarders, Instagrammers who’ve flocked to the bridge and made it their own. Despite less than ideal conditions (the speeding cars and the flimsy “protected” bicycle lanes), the 6th Street Viaduct has become a spot for family strolls, bike rides, scenic views, even quinceañera photos and a podcast recording. This is no mere roadway connecting Boyle Heights and downtown. It’s an opportunity to rethink L.A. transportation infrastructure and public space. The viaduct was built for cars, but it should be reclaimed for people.

Again, the editors advance a vision of public space that is designed for people rather than cars, an argument that has a long history in American urban planning. They also come close to positing a Lefebvrian call for a right to the city. The statement closes by imagining the possibilities for the new bridge that goes beyond its exchange value as a symbolic icon to its latent use value as a cultural space:

Imagine having a safe, beautiful connection between the two communities. The first chaotic weeks of the new 6th Street Viaduct could turn into a rare and wonderful opportunity. The bridge is already a visual landmark. What if it became a cultural landmark as well — marking the beginning of a new era in Los Angeles, one that elevates people over cars.

The quick-fix solutionist strategies that were proposed (and possibly already implemented as of this writing) to restore order on the viaduct were predictable: speed bumps in the traffic lanes and additional fencing along the bridge sides. These “solutions” are just an extension of both defensive architecture in urban space and myopic mobility approaches. The new 6th Street Viaduct is an event, a new urban space that has already changed the urban landscape and altered the Los Angeles skyline. But the discursive space that its reception has opened reveals the broader scope of its transformative potential.

Beyond Crisis Creativity conference & Carrie Furnace Visit

Last month I was pleased to participate in an exciting un-conference that took place at the University of Pittsburgh. Sponsored by Pitt’s Global Studies Center, the Global Academic Partnership Conference: Beyond Crisis Creativity: Imagining New Futures Through Art and Youth Activism brought together artists, scholars, and assorted urban interventionists from Pittsburgh and around the world for a dynamic international dialogue.

The first event I was able to attend was a screening of Style Wars, a classic documentary on early hip hop culture that provides street-level perspective of the burgeoning graffiti scene in 1970s and 80s New York. This was my first viewing of Style Wars and it clearly belongs in the pantheon of essential visual archives of urban subcultures.

The screening was followed by a discussion with Shane Pilster and Max Gonazales, two prominent Pittsburgh graffiti writers and arts educators. I’ve been familiar with different aspects of their respective works for nearly the entire time I’ve been in Pittsburgh, but this was my first opportunity to meet them. During dinner that evening I had to restrain my overenthusiastic impulses to ask about the Pittsburgh graffiti scene and quiz them about various local writers whose names I’ve noticed over the years. I also got to them that I live next to one of their recent mural collaborations in the South Side that they completed last summer.

The next day began with a panel on the theme “Creative Industries and Urban Development in Global Contexts: Tourism, Gentrification, Heritage Work, and Social Justice Advocacy in Urban Arts.” I was delighted to get to meet my recent collaborator Ricardo Klein from the University of Valencia who was attending remotely from Spain, and to make the in-person acquaintances of Ligia Ferro from the University of Porto and Amanda Boston who joined Pitt’s Department of Africana Studies this year.

That afternoon featured a visit to the Carrie Furnaces, a national historic landmark and relic of Pittsburgh’s industrial heyday that is a locus of post-industrial reuse and arts initiatives. This was another example of a local site which I was long-familiar but had never previously visited. Before touring the grounds our group assembled in a massive warehouse space. Prior to the area’s redevelopment into a historic and cultural site, this space was a derelict and decomposing shell which attracted urban explorers and adventurous graffiti writers. Today the building has been renovated with a new roof and lighting, and the walls are covered in paint from both invited muralists as well as regular contributions from the arts workshops that are hosted in the space.

The rest of the grounds are impressive for the awesome post-industrial relics as well as the variety of artwork that has proliferated on the site.

Before leaving we were invited to try our hands at applying spray paint to the walls in the art workshop space. This was yet another first for me so I gave it a shot. After writing my name a few times I declared that I had exhausted my imaginative capacity. Some of the seasoned writers asked if I ever doodled, and when I replied in the affirmative they recommended that I just try some designs that I would typically scribble on a piece of paper. So I came up with this alien/spaceman figure. (I also painted the heart with arrow seen to the right of my name in the photo below, and was commended on my hand control…I did think the heart turned out well.)

Pokemon Go & post-pandemic mobility expectations

I haven’t played Pokemon Go since the early days of its release. It was nearly impossible to avoid the buzz surrounding the game’s launch. And as I wrote back in July 2016, the hype around the game was infectious and the game itself offered an exciting new way of interacting with public spaces in your local environment.

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic last year immediately and drastically altered attitudes toward congregating in public space. I had assigned my Communication Process students an assignment to complete during their spring break: spend time in a populated public space and take field notes on the interactions that they observed. When the scope of the pandemic became clear and our university canceled in-person classes during the spring recess I frantically emailed my students to stress that they were no longer required to complete the assignment and to affirm that it was in their best interests to avoid populated public places.

Many aspects of public life had to adapt to the new social-distancing realities of life under coronavirus, and Pokemon Go was no different. Pokemon Go developer Niantic announced in March 2020 that it was instituting changes in its games in light of the emergent public health imperatives:

“We have always believed that our games can include elements of indoor play that complement the outdoor, exercise and explore DNA of what we build. Now is the time for us to prioritize this work, with the key challenge of making playing indoors as exciting and innovative as our outdoor gameplay. We are adding to our product roadmap so we can enable more ways to play inside and around the home in the coming days and weeks, when the world needs it most.”

One of the changes implemented to Pokemon Go was an increase in the interaction distances for players to engage with location-specific game activities. These changes effectively doubled the distance from which players could interact with GPS-fixed game locations. In November 2020 Niantic provided updates on the changes and stated they would remain in place “at minimum through June 2021.”

Well, Niantic held to this prospective timeline, and last month the developer announced that it would be rolling back the increased interaction distances:

“Previously, PokéStop and Gym interaction distances were increased, to enable people to engage from further away. After this change the distance will revert back to the standard distance, when it makes sense in different places, though may be increased during future events and as part of certain features.”

Many players responded negatively to the reversion. On one of the most prominent Pokemon Go subreddits, The Silph Road, users explicated the immense quality of life improvement that the increased interaction distances provided. As redditor pogo_enthusiast explained:

“Increased interaction distances should stay, if only for reasons of safety and accessibility. Like many others, I was dismayed to see today's announcement concerning the reversion of pokestop and gym interaction distances. Beyond being a (much needed) quality of life feature, increased interaction distances made playing PoGo much safer and enabled disabled individuals in my community to more fully engage in the game.”

pogo_enthusiast outlined several specific ways in which the increased interaction distances improved accessibility:

1. Crossing the street less to engage with stops/gyms

2. Being able to interact with stops/gyms from safer (or more permissible) locations.

3. Being able to raid more discreetly from further away and avoid harassment from other players

4. Being able to keep walking at a normal place while playing, rather than abruptly stopping, slowing down, or moving off pathways to let others by

5. Being able to mitigate the issues of drift and not move around erratically to get in range of a stop/gym

The entire reddit thread regarding the revised interaction differences is fascinating to read. The comments astutely highlight myriad ways in which the gameplay experience was made safer and more accessible by the pandemic-era updates. So far the gamemakers have remained firm in their decision in spite of the outcry from the player base. A Niantic spokesperson justified the decision thusly:

“Last year, we increased the interaction distance to nearly the length of a football field. It’s tough to discover new places at this distance. We’re going to revert the expanded interaction distance in countries and regions where it makes sense to help restore the focus of the game on exploration and discovery. Going outside and spinning PokéStops and Gyms is important to our mission because it encourages exploration of the world.” [emphasis added]

This official explanation raises a question regarding the imperatives of Pokemon Go. How is the promotion of outdoor exploration weighed against the imperatives of profit accumulation inherent to a commercial product? How are these imperatives to be differentiated or disentangled? Around the start of this year redditor jdunham_ritxniantic posted to the Pokemon Go subreddit asking “How has the pandemic affected how you play?” User TheDeviless responded that:

“I stopped giving Niantic money because of their lack of concern for those during a pandemic.”

I think this response changes the inflection of the earlier question. Commercial profit motives aside, how would any initiative formed around the goal of promoting outdoor exercise and exploration responsibly respond to the public health imperative of social distancing? Despite the prevalence of post-pandemic and reopening discourse in our present moment I suspect that this question will remain relevant.

Smoke Signals: Buda’s Wagon and Infrastructure Terrorism in Nashville

“The car bomb, in other words, suddenly became a semi-strategic weapon that under certain circumstances was comparable to air-power in its ability to knock out critical urban nodes and headquarters as well as terrorize populations of entire cities. [...] It is the car bombers’ incessant blasting-away at the moral and physical shell of the city, not the more apocalyptic threats of nuclear or bioterrorism, that is producing the most significant mutations in city form and urban lifestyle.” - Mike Davis, Buda’s Wagon

When the sun dawned over Nashville on Christmas morning the day’s first light illumined dark tufts of smoke above downtown. Like many other Nashvillians my Christmas morning began with local news coverage of a powerful explosion on Second Avenue. Some aspects of the initial details seemed familiar and inherently plausible (an RV transformed into a Vehicle-borne Improvised Explosive Device), while others strained credulity (early rumors of an audio countdown message emanating from the vehicle smacked of Internet hoaxery, though these reports have since been confirmed).

Indeed the early morning attack does seem to have included a warning message that prompted people in the area to evacuate. Remarkably it appears that no one but the perpetrator was killed in the blast. The bombing site in downtown Nashville was in the proverbial shadow of the city’s iconic AT&T skyscraper -- colloquially known as the Batman Building as the tower’s twin antennae somewhat resemble the pointed ears on the caped crusader’s cowl -- yet more significantly the RV was positioned directly in front of an AT&T switching station. This is a building dedicated to housing telecommunications infrastructure; the 15-floor windowless red-brick structure in Nashville bears some superficial resemblance to 33 Thomas Street in Manhattan, the AT&T “Long Lines” building whose 29 stories of windowless brutalist concrete have long sparked observers’ imaginations. 

Considered as an instance of infrastructure terrorism the bombing was quite effective. The explosion didn’t seem to jeopardize the overall structural integrity of the switching station, yet enough damage was done to disrupt critical services. Many areas around the city -- including here in Brentwood -- lost 911 emergency phone services. The Nashville Airport ceased all flight operations due to the telecommunications issues, and the city’s COVID-19 community hotline was also knocked out of commission. Communications were affected throughout the region including in Knoxville, Chattanooga, and Louisville. 

Infrastructure terrorism became a key concern for U.S. authorities following the 9/11 attacks. In 2003 the Department of Homeland Security published a National Strategy for the Physical Protection of Critical Infrastructures and Key Assets. The report details the vulnerabilities inherent to maintaining national and transnational networks supported by critical nodes:

“The facilities, systems, and functions that comprise our critical infrastructures are highly sophisticated and complex. They consist of human capital and physical and cyber systems that work together in processes that are highly interdependent. They each encompass a series of key nodes that are, in turn, essential to the operation of the critical infrastructures in which they function. To complicate matters further, our most critical infrastructures typically interconnect and, therefore, depend on the continued availability and operation of other dynamic systems and functions.” (DHS, 2003, p. 6)

The Nashville bombing thus reveals in spectacular fashion the intrinsic vulnerabilities of infrastructural networks. This vulnerability is not just a threat to urban centers: the use of car bombs to terrorize city populations has a long history, and recent attacks in New York, Toronto, and Nice have demonstrated that a vehicle doesn’t need to be equipped with explosives to cause mass destruction and death. Rather, the apparent target of the Nashville bombing and the subsequent communication disruptions that resulted illustrate the oft-invisible yet overlapping infrastructural entanglements of our networked world. An attack centered on one building in Nashville can produce institutional breakdowns not only throughout the entire city but also in neighboring states. Network resiliency and redundancy was of course the primary goal of ARPANET, the technological foundation for the modern Internet.

The bombing also indicates one of the central paradoxes of our increasingly interconnected technological apparatuses: as the infrastructures of our daily lives become “smarter,” more integrated and networked, they also become more vulnerable to distributed disruption and systemic failure. The implementation of “intelligent” infrastructures in urban environments is often motivated by official imaginaries of omniscient visibility and pervasive control, and accordingly produce attendant anxieties over authoritarian encroachment and the specter of a stifling panoptical security state. Yet the increasing complexity of administrative infrastructures and technologies simultaneously gives rise to greater systemic precarity and emergent opportunities for breakdown.

Mike Davis charts some of the interplay between vehicle-based terrorism and urban governmentality in his book Buda’s Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb (2007/2017). Echoing the DHS quote above, he situates the spread of car bombings in an “open source” era of terrorism marked by “a seamless merger of technologies: the car bomb plus the cell phone plus the Internet together constitute a unique infrastructure for global networked terrorism that obviates any need for transnational command structures or vulnerable hierarchies of decision-making” (p. 11, emphases in original).

Davis also notes that car bombs are “‘loud’ in every sense,” as these explosions are “usually advertisements for a cause, leader, or abstract principle” (p. 9).

“In contrast to other forms of political propaganda, from graffiti on walls to individual assassinations, their occurrence is almost impossible to deny or censor. This certainty of being heard by the world, even in a highly authoritarian or isolated setting, is a major attraction to potential bombers.” (ibid.)

Davis cites Regis Debray’s observation that such attacks are “manifestos written in the blood of others.” Yet the Nashville bombing has thus far failed to yield an explicit political motive or ideological agenda. The Christmas-day confusion was compounded not only by the revelation of the audio warning announcements, but also by the lack of any corresponding media manifesto or claims of responsibility. The volitional vacuum prompted news and social media discourse to project possible motives onto the perpetrator: perhaps the bomber was a right-winger who targeted the AT&T building because of the 5G-Coronavirus conspiracy, or maybe a leftist seeking retribution for the telecomm company’s complicity in domestic spying programs? Personally, I felt the technological elements of both the target and the weapon evoked Unabomber vibes, although the preliminary evacuation notice evinced a greater concern for collateral damage and human life than Kaczynski’s methods.

The impulse to apprehend an underlying motive behind an act of mass violence is understandable, yet ultimately no explanation for terror or mass murder can ever be satisfying or even elucidating. Our current political climate produces knee-jerk responses to inciting events that seek to assign ideological complicity to the “other side,” casting preemptive blame to our imagined opponents (i.e. “this is surely the work of a MAGA anti-masker,” or “this must be a BLM assault on the police” ) such that our own ideological position is affirmed and our cognitive maps cohere. Rituals of scapegoating have long provided essential support for both group and personal identities. Yet no declaration of intent can truly explain wanton destruction, just as no ideological rationalization can justify mass murder.

In recent history the Las Vegas massacre perpetrated by Stephen Paddock epitomizes the unfulfilled search for an explanatory motive. The question of what circumstances led up to Paddock raining bullets on a crowd of concert-goers has fueled futile speculation and conspiracy theory. When police photos of Paddock’s hotel-suite-turned-sniper’s-nest appeared online, viewers seized upon a piece of paper visible on a side table as a critical clue. Surely this was the killer’s suicide note, or personal manifesto, some explanation for the attack! It turned out the paper bore only mathematical equations for calculating trajectory, the killer’s calculus for maximizing mortality.

The lack of a clearly defined motivation can be experienced as a secondary shock to the initial trauma of the attack itself. It seems to deny some semblance of resolution or closure. So far no underlying explanation for the Nashville bombing has been unearthed. It remains an explosive enigma rendered all the more inexplicable by the bomber’s choice to broadcast a warning message prior to detonation. Yet the police have revealed that the vehicle-based speaker system not only conveyed a verbal countdown notice, they also played music:

“Police in the area moments before the blast said the speakers also played the wistful 1963 song ‘Downtown’ by Petula Clark. The lyric, about going to the city to seek refuge from sadness, echoed down Second Avenue just before the blast: ‘The lights are much brighter there.’”

Without reading too much into the song choice as a potential clue, the reported musical selection does seem to suggest that the perpetrator saw some significance to the location of his attack beyond the mere tactical position of the apparent target. The use of the song “Downtown” conveys a striking concession to the particularities of place in comparison to the considerations of extended networks and distributed effects offered earlier. And while the ramifications of terror attacks may resonate across geographic distance and within virtual spaces, every ground zero occupies material as well as mental territory.