Fragmentation splits a singular environment into multiple perceptions. As such, fragmentation reflects an essential counterpart to conflation; both work in tandem along differing levels of cognition. While conflation gathers multiple sites into the same continuum, fragmentation works simultaneously to fracture that omnitopian experience into isolated surface-level images, functions, and interactions. As a result, one can hardly discern a singular narrative or community within omnitopia. Aided by fragmentation, omnitopia can hardly be said to be homogenous or totalizing as a prison or an office park. It rather appears as a loose assemblage of atomized interactions: accidental encounters, functional questions, consumer purchases. As I will explore elsewhere, fragmentation also provides the means to posit genuine fissures within the omnitopian enclave, even though these local experiences may be unforeseen and short-lived.

While conflation represents the gathering of distinct experiences into a singular perception, fragmentation emerges in the superficial “this” and “here” that one manages to experience within omnitopia, along with the potential for a seemingly meaningful locale to erupt from the omnitopian continuum at any moment. In this manner, fragmentation works to splinter the sweeping historical narrative, crafting incongruent shards of the present, everywhere complete and distinct. We find fragmentation in the shopping mall food court mentioned in the earlier description of conflation when a patron chooses one particular vendor, imagining that “this” counter is somehow detached from the collection of consumer counters. We also find fragmentation when we visit a fast food restaurant and interact with workers speaking to people at the counter and in their cars via a headset, rendering both interactions automated and alienating. As a practice of late modern capitalism, fragmentation perfects the lessons of designers and planners who have learned from Las Vegas by crafting abrupt spaces of apparent novelty and variation that remove the coherent narrative that risks critique.