Researches among the Haussmannisation of the Web.

There is a very similar pattern that you find in the structure of societies, in the structure of companies and in the structure of computers. All three are moving in the same direction. That is, away from a top-down structure of a central command system giving the system instructions about how to behave, toward a system that is parallel, that is flat, which is a web and [through] which change moves from the bottom up. And this is going to happen across all institutions and technical devices; it's the way they work.

Nick Land, in Visions of Heaven and Hell (1994); (Using the transcription from Do Not Research)


The Passage de l'Opera, 1822-1823. Musee Camavalet, Paris. Photo copyright © Phototheque des Musees de la Ville de Paris.

The father of Surrealism was Dada; its mother was an arcade. Dada, when the two first met, was already old. At the end of 1919, Aragon and Breton, out of antipathy to Montparnasse and Montmartre, transferred the site of their meetings with friends to a café in the Passage de l'Opéra. Construction of the Boulevard Haussmann brought about the demise of the Passage de l'Opéra. Louis Aragon devoted 135 pages to this arcade; in the sum of these three digits hides the number nine—the number of muses who bestowed their gifts on the newborn Surrealism. They are named Luna, Countess Geschwitz, Kate Greenaway, Mors, Cléo de Mérode, Dulcinea, Libido, Baby Cadum, and Friederike Kempner[...]

Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p.82 (First Harvard University Press paperback edition, 2002, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin)

In the hallway there is a mirror which faithfully duplicates all appearances. Men usually infer from this mirror that the Library is not infinite (if it really were, why this illusory duplication?); I prefer to dream that its polished surfaces represent and promise the infinite... Light is provided by some spherical fruit which bear the name of lamps. There are two, transversally placed, in each hexagon. The light they emit is insufficient, incessant.

Borges, The Library of Babel (J.E.I. trans.)