Cyber-Porcine Urban Sprawl

Alternate title: On the True Nature of Feral Cities.

Another one for the serious news category, this one from The Economist, which apparently has a sense of humor (or its layout editors are smoking crack, you pick). On the Brussels-London Eurostar, I was thumbing through the 6-12 December issue, when I almost fell out of my seat. On the same two pages, 56 and 57, I found the following three articles, all lined up like daffy ducks in a psychotropic row:

• The Worm Turns: A Cyber Attack Alarms the Pentagon
• Feral Hogs: If You Go Down to the Woods Today
• City of the Future: A Rare Opportunity to Build an Urban Centre From Scratch

Read singly, not a big deal. Read three in a row, and there’s an unmistakable suggestion at work connecting a virtual viral infection that’s spread throughout the national security cyber infrastructure, the proliferation of millions – MILLIONS – of giant, hairy, tusked porkers, and a small town in the middle of nowhere looking to more or less spontaneously self-generate.

Now, I’m not going to suggest that The Economist gets its story ideas and inspiration from CTlab, but… if there’s a meme-god out there, he’s reading CTlab, looking around at all the mainstream media, and with a slight chuckle and mischievous gleam in his eye, infusing some of the latter with a sense of the former. I suppose that wouldn’t really be a meme thing, exactly; more like predestinarianism, but whatever.

There’s a Hogtown joke in here somewhere…