8.19.1 How and where our information travels from banks, credit cards, and social security offices is mostly a mystery to us. Every time we buy something, subscribe to a magazine, or pay our taxes, the information goes somewhere. All these documents could be linked into life dossiers with our entire financial and medical history, with details of what we buy and who we communicate with. Rather than encouraging unprecedented scrutiny and control, Information Personae aspire towards a secure parity between individuals and organisations. It will automatically record who has accessed its body and for what purpose. This is not only in service of paranoid thoughts of invisible control, but also for active participation in building like-minded communities. For this reason, developments in encryption technologies such as the PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) program [15] developed by Phil Zimmerman, are an important piece of the puzzle.

8.19.2 Fuller discovered an interrelationship between Euler's topology vertices, faces, and edges, with his discovery of "geometry's closest-packed, unit radius, omni-intertriangulated spheres." The vectorial lines between the centres of the closest packed unit radius spheres produced what is known as the isotropic vector matrix, meaning the vector matrix consisted entirely of tetrahedra and octahedra. This principle was utilised in much of his architecture and in his design of the Dymoxian maps. As we saw in the previous chapter, the discovery of the molecule that so resembled his structures and was named after him (the Buckminsterfullerene) proved this principles to be deeply connected to how our universe is structured. Ingber showed in his twenty plus years of research that tensegrity is inherent in molecular, cellular, and muscular structures and keeps reappearing. The central premise of this thesis is to show that if these principles of triangulation work in physical as well as molecular structures, they should be applied to online architectures as well. [top] Notes:

15. You may download PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) at www.pgpi.com To read about the author of the program, Phil Zimmerman, see: www.spectacle.org/795/zimm.html [back]