Solnit and Schwartzenberg chronicle the real Y2k problem in San Francisco: a fin de siècle real estate boom and accelerated crisis of hous- ing displacement, as experienced by the City’s artists and cultural activ- ists. It’s the direct result of the World Wide Web, the propulsive growth of the internet economy, and a more long-standing spillover of unmet housing demand from the fabled Silicon Valley, south of San Francisco. Class conflict is front and center as developers and ‘dot-com-mers,’ fu- eled by incomes inflated with venture capital, threaten the homes and haunts of a particularly vital arts community. Over the course of several generations, San Francisco artists have turned voluntary poverty and “marginality” into an industry of culture—an economic force in a global city fed by tourism, corporate headquarters, and grants from the Na- tional Endowment for the Arts.

The author describes a wide variety of new digital technologies with suggestive questions on their implications for changing the physical and socialexperienceoftheurbanenvironment. Herangesfreely(andlightly), across theory, technology, and visionary hype, while seeding the text with references to Aristotle, Plato, Mumford and McLuhan, and figures made familiar by WIRED magazine such as Ted Nelson, early proponent of computers as a tools of personal liberation, and Nicolas Negroponte, founder of MIT’s experimental Media Lab. While no theory is applied consistently, Mitchell does invoke themes from classical urban theory: the value of the agora, the public meeting place, and the nature of com- munity relationships (“without propinquity”) in the emergent e-topia.