"Globalization and new technologies attract people to big cities, by increasing the returns to urban proximity. While it would be technically possible to sit and write software somewhere in the Vale of Kashmir (at least if you didn’t mind the bullets), the innovators in Indian information technology cluster around one another in Bangalore. America’s computer wizards likewise choose to cluster in Silicon Valley rather than disperse…."

""Slacktivism" is the ideal type of activism for a lazy generation: why bother with sit-ins and the risk of arrest, police brutality, or torture if one can be as loud campaigning in the virtual space? …"

What happens when first world art rubs up against third world art? Does it bleed? The Grand Rue Sculptors are a community of artists living in a downtown slum neighborhood of Port-au-Prince, Haiti. This is the newest art community to have emerged in the last ten years. They have produced art that reflects a heightened, Gibsonesque, Lo-Sci-Fi, dystopian view of their society, culture and religion, and have dragged Haitian art into the 21st century. Jean Herard Celeur, Andre Eugene and Guyodo are at the core of the movement, which contains seven or eight other younger artists, all producing powerful sculptural works. Their work has opened entirely new vistas into the creative possibilities of the Vodou-inspired arts of Haiti. Their muscular sculptural collages of engine manifolds, computer entrails, TV sets, medical debris, skulls and discarded lumber transforms the detritus of a failing economy into deranged, post-apocalyptic totems.