Deep in the night there is a thick heartbeat. It pounds. It moves. Puffs of air inside an underground concrete shelter. It makes the walls vibrate, it makes your stomach reverberate.
For every beat, circuits are switched on and circuits switched off. There is a rhythm, under the heavy clouds that are lit up softly by the city lights.
The crowd is moving to the music. Binary flows; jumping up and down, raising their hands back and forth, lowering their heads, raising their heads. From a distance it looks like waves in water, like traffic in the metropolis, like the machines in a factory.
A mass has no intensity as long as it follows a single transistor rhythm. The uniform has no expression. But if you connect two or more entities in a mass, you associate. This is the basic principle of binary datalove.
Of creation.
The Solid State Societies - Aleph-one - all unfold to transistor rhythms. There are technological vibrations everywhere, pounding in uniform, trying to make the world homogenous. The urban plan is a grid. The roads are as straight as possible, the city lights switch on according to digital clockworks, people avoid eye-contact only to be able to walk faster. You wake up to your transistor alarm clock. You move in the urban syntax where everything is monitored by electronics. Radio waves carrying binary information pierce through your body.
This is the pulse of the world. You need to hack it!
When you leave the mass - when you no longer move in uniform - there are infinite possibilities of association: You seek out a subject or an object - it doesn't really matter what the appearance is - and you establish a connection. You look into someone's eyes, you press a key, you hold on to the concrete wall. Whenever you project into the future a remote trajectory of association with someone, you make datalove.
In the concrete shelter, someone is waving a hand, blinking with their eyes, smiling for a moment, stepping to the right or to the left. In every instance of duration - in each fraction of "intensive time" - you can associate a small part of yourself with someone else. You imitate, you repeat, you copy.
Whenever you extend your affects to touch someone else; the moment you reach out and when you smile through the monstrous meshwork we sometimes call "internet", you make datalove. Then, for a brief instance, space turns into time. What matters is no longer miles or kilometers, it is only a question of milliseconds, as your telepresence is growing inside the tunnels. The most simple command of the internet protocol - ping - becomes the beat of datalove.
This is the transistor rhythm of your heart.
Deep in the metropolis, we breath together, even though our bodies are scattered around the world. In square concrete rooms that run on electric currents we stare into the telescreens, reconfiguring them to maximize the flows of datalove. We know that at any time, an enemy of datalove may attempt to break the flow. The commentators of politics call it "censorship". We instead see firewalls and inspection boxes, we see computers programmed for war, when all that we want is datalove. This is why we keep digging tunnels.
One day, in the future that we project ourselves into, AT&TLantis shall no longer need burrows.
But until then, we meet in the dark tunnels.
Inside the fiberoptic maze,
or on the subterranean dancefloors.