On the 27th of July 1656, the Amsterdam Sephardic community issued the most violent writ of excommunication in the Western religious record against a twenty-three-year-old lens-grinder named Baruch de Spinoza. The writ specified that no member of the community might approach the excommunicated man within four cubits. Doing Direct takes those four cubits as its operating principle.
At four cubits' distance, the heretic remains visible. What becomes possible at four cubits is the operation that was not possible at zero.
Volume Three of the CityCam trilogy traces the 370-year lineage of dissent at four cubits ? from Spinoza through Blake and Paine in Lambeth, through Keynes at Bretton Woods, through the four contemporary pamphleteers ? and answers the question the trilogy has been building to: how do we take this power away? The answer is the Bank of North Dakota, the German Sparkassen, and the Hampshire Community Bank. The Reformation is not complete. It is completable.
