It has been said that “computers have done to communication what cars have done to roads.” Communication, as a phenomenon, gathers us by way of language—linguistic, musical, bodily, or any other form—for the sharing of ourselves with others, and others with us.

And as communication calls us, so too do the spaces upon, in, and through which we—strangers and friends—amble, breath, see, hear, and in all ways seek and find: paths, boulevards, avenues, streets, roads, ways.

But, as communities arising from and within a culture, our aim—be it an imperative of evolutionary necessity or a collectivistic historical will—to become that for which we are destined (in whatever sense one might understand such a concept) is inevitably subsumed by an inversion of our original human unfolding and striving, a profanation of simply living with and for others. That way of being becomes increasingly covered over, generation after generation, until goals, having lost their…