
Connections shape and reshape cartography. As the reach of new digital and physical infrastructures reimagine interactions and geographies, it’s possible that HyperLoop will do the same. In the old metropolis, villages were engulfed by suburbs, in the next one, old cities become new neighbourhoods. This will revise histories and converge futures. Triangle was the city that emerged from a new HyperLoop connection in the Italian peninsula’s northwest.
“Nella svalutazione del passato è implicita una giustificazione della nullità del presente // Devaluing the past is an implicit justification of the present’s nothingness.”
— Antonio Gramsci
Damnatio memoriae
The monolithic agency that came to control Triangle introduced a standard issue guide to the city for all denizens and visitors. Triangle’s auditor, the All Seeing A.I., kept the guide up-to-date and termed this the ‘damnatio memoriae’ as a homage to the Roman concept of altering the historical record after the facts. Below are some extracts from that text.
Abolished delays and a new time operating system
HyperLoop created more time. Underpinning the All Seeing A.I.’s calculus of benefit to achieve the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people is the concept of reliable commuter times. The word delay was retired once the emerging travel network fell under the All Seeing A.I.’s purview. This reflects the broader requirement for Triangle denizens to adopt the city’s Permanent Now Operating System (PNOS) alongside vaccinations in childhood.The World Wide Web gave information a planar quality, enabling access to anyone, anywhere, at any point; PNOS does the same to time.
Time is information. Industrial time was too vulnerable to failure from organic life. Deadlines were missed and denizens’ goals were not always readily identifiable. PNOS was implemented to enable Triangle residents to clearly allocate objectives to all timeslots in their Outlook calendar schedules. Individuals’ PNOS data cumulatively creates a forest of information that is legible en masse to a phalanx of non-neural organisms called PNOSers. PNOSers will automatically calibrate defined objectives in timeslots that appear free in an individual denizen’s Outlook calendar. The PNOS system ensures individuals are fully utilised and Triangle’s collective productivity is maximised.

Sensorium urbanism
Triangle’s urban form is based on a number of interconnected sensoriums. Senosoria started life as HyperLoop interchanges to enable efficient retail and movements in high capacity areas. They developed into main typology of public space in the city by merging with the shopping mall, a proto-sensorium. A sensorium can be characterised as an atmosphere controlled by non-neural organisms who regulate each place’s fragrances, temperatures, soundscapes and lighting levels. These inputs adapt to respond to the average mood of denizens traversing these spaces. In this way a sensorium can optimise and wayfind behaviour change in line with the aspiration of true denizens, i.e. the corporations that maintain consumer demand one of the key measure of Triangle’s economy. With the abolition of junkspaces such as the piazza, the All Seeing A.I. was able to replace the ambiguity of social interaction found in these Milanese, Torinese and Genoese non-places, with value making spaces that provide clear functional navigation to retail and commercial activities. Wayfinding in a sensorium is aided by the security blanket provided by the All Seeing A.I. which predicts non-conformist behaviour.

The agency of transport
Movement is power. The All Seeing A.I. recognises commuting as Triangle’s most important cultural practice, most notably evidenced in the new Journey Time Reliability religion that emerged soon after HyperLoop’s construction.
Places only exist relative to other places. This is true thanks to transport. The city was always a champion of early transport innovations to ensure the proximity of different places. The neighbourhood of Milan spawned the pioneering Bianchi bicycle that used same sized to equal-sized wheels with pneumatic rubber tyres, Genoa’s Piaggio company created the world’s first scooter, Vespa, while the Turin neighbourhood manufactured one of Eurasia’s pioneering affordable cars, the FIAT 500.
Transport facilitated the new services, the reduction in marginal costs, and the reformation of Triangle’s social contract to bring the city under one bureaucratic structure. In the pre-automated era, the port neighbourhood of Genoa was a major employer linked to the major factory-employers in Turin and Milan. Trains between the three poles transported the goods each produced and traded. Journey times remained constant for a century until the HyperLoop unified the three disparate metro systems, to connect new flows between Triangle’s three neighbourhoods.
Vertispace
Vertispace is the second most important transport facilitator after HyperLoop. Planning regulation requires all buildings to provide 70% of vertispace GFA, roof and balcony areas, to the All Seeing A.I.’s drone systems. The city has two airports, Torino-Caselle and Malpensa. Two previous airports were discontinued by the All Seeing A.I. to maximise interchange efficiencies. Linate was designated as the city’s main cryptocoin mining site, Cristoforo Colombo Airport in the port neighbourhood of Genoa was converted into a private airfield for the Triangle’s heads of industry, and Bergamo airport became a new landing strip for European Space X travel.

Cultural evolution
HyperLoop construction was a chrysalis for a new evolution of culture in Triangle. The intangible legacy of the three poles leaves its marks in subtle ways on urban life as the city’s cultural metabolism digests what was previously there.
Cultural heritage
Triangle hosts a number of UNESCO heritage sites spread across the three neighbourhoods of Milan, Genoa, and Turin. The only inter-neighbourhood UNESCO heritage site is the city’s most recent, the Triangle HyperLoop system. The practice of HyperLoop commuting was also recognised as UNESCO intangible culture.Triangle lingo
Language
The local lingo, Triangolese, an Indo-European language, is a blend of Italian, Occitan, Piedmontese, Milanese, Ligurian, and Global English. It emerged from the first city-wide machine learning language lab that processed vocabulary used through the ages, and then incrementally introduced the it in during announcements on HyperLoop and in sensoria. All school education is taught in both Global English and Triangolese.
Gastronomic convergence
The All Seeing A.I. promotes food as an important way to overcome the greatest maladies faced by the city: WhatsApp Fatigue and digital obesity. The local staple, cofoc, is a type of panino made up of three elements of Triangle’s food history. A Genoese focaccia bread is stuffed with a Milanese cotoletta covered in the Piedmontese Salsa Verde. Other specialities include the panzerotto al sugo di noci, and basil gianduja.

Sport
HyperCommuter is an award for the fastest commute calculated on the ratio between distance and from workplace and time taken to travel on the HyperLoop-sensorium network is the most coveted sports trophy in the city. The All Seeing A.I. notes a drop in productivity whenever the HyperCommute results are announced.
Some ancient e-sports are still celebrated by the All Seeing A.I. through re-enactment festivals — the most notable being the Cyberstalking Palio and Trolling all’Antica both of which attract large digital crowds.
The city is home to six professional football clubs, Torino, Juventus, A.C. Milan, Internazionale, Genoa C.F.C, and Sampdoria. The over-saturation of Derby football matches in the city saw the All Seeing A.I. introduce a consolidated derby of three-sided football played three times a year. Each neighbourhood’s teams band together to form one representative outfit, Sampoa, Milazionale, and Juto with the winners sharing 9 points.

Economy
All Seeing A.I. records indicate that Triangle has the largest GDP per capita in Mediterranean basin. From the institution of a token economy, its success has been based on structured cooperation between academia and industry. Under a policy called Machina Learning, the city authorities brought together different sectors to share knowledge and provide new foresight. This has avoided the deskilling that has occurred in cities not merged by HyperLoop infrastructure. The Machina Learning policy led to the creation of the A.I. that curates the city’s governance, the All Seeing A.I. Initial establishment of the A.I. was met with such incredulity that it was thought to be a Mechanical Turk initiative run by neural organisms. The efficiencies that incrementally became apparent in Triangle policies, urban infrastructures, and blockchain bonds, made it clear that this governance ecosystem was indeed a non-neural organism. From curator, it changed title to become auditor.

QuarTri
Under the All Seeing A.I.’s vision, ancient OpenSource imagination was halted and a new approach to innovation was established by creating a network to set the innovation agenda. This network, which is in each Triangle neighbourhood makes up the distributed innovation district, QuarTri. QuarTri maximises the efficiency of collaboration between different sectors, something less predictable when innovation could emerge spontaneously through chance. All innovation in Triangle is certified by the network’s members – IIT, Casa Jasmina, Nesta Italia, and Progetto Rena – ensuring that products and services are tested between different consumer A.I.s before being released to the market.
Borsa Triangle
Triangle’s stock exchange is the oldest in the world. From earlier incarnations as the Borsa Italiana, the exchange moved back to the Genoa neighbourhood in the refurbished Loggia della Mercanzia building. Among its listings are a significant number of Blue Chip companies that joined after Frexit.
Cryptojacking
One of the lingering issues from the Crypto Wars that resurfaces is the practice of cryptojacking. This occurs mostly in sensoriums where an algorithm hack has led to the sensory deprivation of the non-neural organisms that control the atmospheres. Hackers exploit these rare glitches in the security ecosystem and attempt to cover their traces in PNOS manipulation. Denizens are recommended to be on guard at all times, and report any suspicious sensorium behaviour.

Religion
Since the All Seeing A.I. established a state of Permanent Now, the Duomo of Torino has become Triangle’s most important religious centre. Following its repurposing as the city’s leading CRISPR institution, it is the centre of Triangle’s life extension and gene therapy work. The CRISPR system attracts many followers in the city, who attend weekly briefings on the latest research. The building is one of the most secure facilities in Triangle, as it’s under ongoing threat from a sect of fundamental CRISPR acolytes, many of whom are on the All Seeing A.I.’s terrorist watch list. Oncoming attackers are fired upon with large doses of dopamine shots to change their states of consciousness. The building also hosts one of the most important relics of the ancient Catholic religion, the Turin Shroud. Minority religions include the JourneyTime Alliance, Minecraft, and Buddhism.
History
Foundational myth
Tradition holds that three poles of growth were first occupied by small settlements not grouped or recognised as a city called Triangle. The denizens of the three settlements began to participate in exchanges in Late Antiquity. In the sixth century A.D., Onorato the Bishop of Milan sought refuge in Genoa following the sacking of his settlement by the Lombards, who in the next century under King Rotharii unified the three poles as a Lombard Kingdom. The treaties of Verdun and Meersen in the 9th Century reestablished the poles under one political unity, connected to Middle Francia, an early precursor to the Blue Banana. The interregnum between the Middle Ages and the 19th Century saw governance fragment and change hands between the House of Savoy, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Napoleonic France among others. But it was an economic imperative that began to bond the disparate groups with the emergence of industry. The city of Triangle came into being as the separate settlements began acting as group, manufacturing and trading together. First as the informally known ‘Triangolo industriale’. Later, in the middle 21st Century, the HyperLoop was constructed to cement their unity.
Cryptoinfra Wars
The cryptoinfra- or decentralisation- wars are an element of history that forms part of the compulsory curricula for all Triangle denizens. There was an insurgency of self-proclaimed anti-infrastructure cypherpunks mistakenly nourished by feelings counter to the Triangle’s collective spacio-temporal grid. The insurgents believed in resilience from centrality and automation and attempted to override the city’s digital and physical commons. They recruited from early cryptocurrency champions as well as the No Tav and No Gronda campaigns. While the All Seeing A.I. encourages idea sports within allocated timeslots, the insurgents’ idea was to halt infrastructure improvements and actualise a decentralised distributed ledger to be used to create money and create new governance models outside of the All Seeing A.I.’s control. Eventually the All Seeing A.I. initiated Operation Pandora’s Box to bring the insurgents to justice. In a triumph for Triangle, the All Seeing A.I. was reestablished as the gatekeeper to the digital commons and sole issuer of crypto-coins and the HyperLoop expansion was resumed.

