A weblog by Tom Coates concerning future media, social software and the web of data
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The motherships have landed...

Posted April 25, 2003 5:24 PM.

Driving around Santa Clara is like being inside an episode of Stargate - it's like there's a flat desolate alien landscape all around us that's being used as a massive landing strip for these huge monstrous mother-ship style buildings. Each building has a brand that's sharp and occasionally scarily authoritarian in appearance - like the flags for an alien regime. I keep thinking that there are lizard creatures inside that have come to dominate the earth. Around the monstrous motherships (our hotel is one), all these smaller buildings are littered around - like cleaner fish around a whale, or like the tents and mud-structures that surround the huge architectural beasts of pyramid-like tombs. They're subservient buildings, housing creatures with no other purpose than to serve the whatever-the-fuck-it-is that is living its domineering life in the bowels of Network Solutions or Globix or...

When I see them in our rare trips outside the building, I never feel certain that there won't be a terrible rumbling and shaking with smoke and dust everywhere and they won't just lift off to find a new world to colonise and destroy. It's kind of arcane and beautiful in a 'beauty of the bush-fire" kind of way. I love it here.

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