Bucharest: Little Neo-Tokyo (a hyperstition)

Prologue: The City and the City

Neo-Tokyo. Night. Fleas dance across the black sky like on cathode-ray tube televisions. Huge monoliths of glass and metal reflect the nothingness all around. A jarring nothingness, catalyzed by the thousands of multicolored neon lights hanging from the edges of the buildings. Among them, the highway lanes that crisscross the city. Right at the bottom, close to the ground, a layer of smog. Through the thick fog, people swarm the streets of the bazaar, where electronic circuits, fresh sushi, or doses of soma are sold. Above them, the techno-economic hubbub, hidden at the highest levels of the skyscrapers. Among the endless aisles of servers, behind the digital fortifications, people and machines are caught up in the palmistry of capital. But the lines of the invisible, regulating hand (the ancients’ favorite superstition) have long since become indistinguishable. No one is at the controls. In fact, there aren’t even any controls le