By Eric Kluitenberg

In his essay "Presenting the Unpresentable: The Sublime", the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard observes that Capitalism, the Techno-Sciences and the Pictorial Avant-Garde of the twentieth century share an 'affinity to infinity'. All three point towards a sensibility that is constitutive for the experience of the modern world.

In an important series of articles,1,2,3,4 Rich Hammer has recently invited us to rethink some of our assumptions about what a libertarian societywould be like. We ordinarily think of a libertarian society as one of maximum freedom and maximum privacy: a society where you can do whatever youlike (so long as it's peaceful) and no one else can pry into your personal affairs.

Much is made of the difference between 'virtual' and 'actual'. Otherthan asserting a distinction between 'unreal' and the 'real', the uses ofsuch oppositions demonstrates the real workings of a conflict between different approaches to and mappings of space, as both cyberspace and landscape.The singular experience of the net consists in making manifest a particular sense and use of space-including the so-called 'real' space of the world's surface-that has no place in officially-sanctioned, or rather petrified, maps and models.