The 110th Floor of the World Trade Center
Michel de Certeau opened "Walking in the City," the most famous chapter of The Practice of Everyday Life, by standing on the 110th floor of the World Trade Center and describing the panoramic view of Manhattan. From that altitude, the city's grid becomes visible—the avenues running north-south, the cross-streets organizing the blocks, the traffic flowing in patterns that resemble the circulation of blood through a designed organism. The view from above is the strategic view: it sees the city as a totality, as a text that can be read, as a system that can be governed. Then de Certeau descended to the street. At street level, the grid disappears. The walker sees the block she is crossing, the corner she is turning, the specific texture of this particular Tuesday morning. She navigates by habit, by memory, by the accumulated embodied knowledge of thousands of previous walks—knowledge the map cannot contain. The walker produces, through her walking, a city-within-the-city, an invisible text laid down on the surface of the planned city that the planner's map cannot capture. This scene established the methodological foundation of de Certeau's entire project: the view from above sees strategies; the view from below sees tactics. Both are real. Neither is complete without the other.
In the AI Story
The 110th-floor observation deck of the World Trade Center's South Tower was a tourist attraction offering a panoramic view of Manhattan—the ultimate strategic vantage. De Certeau visited in the late 1970s while teaching at the University of California, San Diego, and used the experience as the set piece for his most widely read essay. The image's power lies in the ascent and descent: de Certeau does not reject the strategic view but supplements it. The planner's knowledge is real—the grid exists, the infrastructure functions, the strategic organization produces genuine order. But the planner's knowledge is partial. It sees the space; it cannot see the place. It sees the design; it cannot see the practice.
The metaphor maps onto the AI discourse with uncomfortable precision. The dominant conversation about AI is conducted from the 110th floor: capability benchmarks, model architectures, scaling laws, policy frameworks, existential risk assessments. This is the strategic view—necessary, real, analytically productive. But it is partial. It sees the model's capabilities but not the builder's practice. It sees adoption curves but not the specific quality of individual engagement. It sees aggregate productivity gains but not the personal, biographical, habitual ways that millions of practitioners are navigating the model's output space, finding shortcuts the designers did not anticipate, producing works that belong to the walking rather than to the grid.
Edo Segal's confession in The Orange Pill—'I have spent my career looking at dashboards… I was good at it'—is the confession of someone who has lived on the 110th floor. De Certeau's framework is the instruction to descend. Not to abandon the strategic view but to recognize its partiality. The patterns are real. The individual practices are also real. And the practices—dispersed, invisible, tactically creative—are where the meaning of the AI transformation is being written, one walk at a time, by billions of practitioners who are not waiting for permission from the 110th floor to begin making the city their own.
Origin
The scene was written in the late 1970s and published in The Practice of Everyday Life (1980), Chapter VII, "Walking in the City." De Certeau drew on the Situationists' concept of the dérive (drift), on Guy Debord's analysis of spectacular urbanism, and on his own theological training—the Jesuit practice of finding God in particulars rather than abstractions.
Key Ideas
The 110th floor sees the grid; the street sees the walking. Two vantages, two knowledges, both real, neither complete without the other.
The strategic view produces legibility. From above, the city coheres, the system makes sense, the order is visible. But the view is purchased by distance from practice.
The tactical view produces specificity. From below, the walker knows what the map cannot show—the texture of this walk, this morning, this specific route through the grid.
AI discourse is conducted from the 110th floor. Benchmarks, policies, aggregate metrics. De Certeau's instruction: descend. Look at what the practitioners are doing on the street.
Appears in the Orange Pill Cycle
Further reading
- Michel de Certeau, "Walking in the City," Chapter VII of The Practice of Everyday Life
- Guy Debord, "Theory of the Dérive," Situationist International Anthology, ed. Ken Knabb
- Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Random House, 1961)
- Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking (Penguin, 2000)