What struck me most at Manuel Castell's talk at AOIR last year was his emphasis on examctly the opposite of this "distributed networking" happening with respect to business locations. Cities like SF and NYC, and regions like Silicon Valley, were growing denser and denser, just as the technologies they were developing seemed to promise to obliterate distance in time and space. As I remember, Castells concluded that there was some fundamental level of "human capital" that was necessary for the face-to-face engagement that's still at the core of even postmodern business deals. So, the more spread out the world gets, the more centalized these "nodes" must be, to serve the periphery. At the time, it seemed ironic, almost nostalgaic; now, it does seem doomed. I imagine corporate headquarters becoming the same kinds of paramilitary "gated communities" described in Mike Davis's City of Quartz and Neal Stephenson's Snowcrash. Of course, Castells also hyped the wonders of Cisco's business model, just before their stock tanked. Any other thoughts on how the attacks may change the geography of America? -- Ted Friedman, Ph.D. Assistant Professor, Department of Communication Georgia State University (404) 463-9522 tedf@gsu.edu; ted@tedfriedman.com http://www.tedfriedman.com