Drew Austin's talk at Refactor Camp 2013.

1. Behind the
Urban Interface

2. “She looked down a slope, needing to squint for the
sunlight, onto a vast sprawl of houses which had grown
up all together, like a well-tended crop, from the dull
brown earth; and she thought of the time she’d opened
a transistor radio to replace a battery and seen her first
printed circuit. The ordered swirl of houses and streets,
from this high angle, sprang at her now with the same
unexpected, astonishing clarity as the circuit card had.
Though she knew even less about radios than about
Southern Californians, there were to both outward
patterns a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of
an intent to communicate. There’d seemed no limit to
what the printed circuit could have told her.”
Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49

4. “Our networked society is increasingly dominated by what Lewis Mumford called
the unseen world of cables, wires, connections, codes, agreements, and capital.
Today more than ever, the role of this invisible city in determining the structure of
the urban area is vast. Visible form is merely an irruption of other forces, a
graphic user interface for a more powerful command line below.”
Kazys Varnelis

6. Software Hardware

8. “Where we’re
going, we need
roads.”