This is a guest post by Christina Waters, who writes about art, wine, and food for the greater Bay Area community at christinawaters.com and teaches Critical Theory and wordplay at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

In last week’s post I idly wondered about whether the notion of ‘future nausea’ that I talked about had any relationship to the term in the sense of Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous 1938 novel, Nausea. Reader Dan L. suggested a connection between Sartre-nausea and the idea of mindfulness, which further intrigued me. Christina, who did her PhD work on Sartre’s theory of the imagination,  posted a comment confirming my suspicion that there was indeed a relationship. So I asked her to do a guest post highlighting some possible connections worth exploring.

So here you go. You may want to read the Wikipedia entry about the book, linked above, for context first.

***

Venkat muses about Sartre’s Nausea seen as a perspective on mindfulness. Perhaps, perhaps not—and we’ll return to that idea a bit later. But nausea is a perspective which makes him (or rather his literary avatar, Roquentin) sick.

Just why is this? Couldn’t Sartre simply face the ugly underbelly of meaningless reality (life, self, others, etc.) with a sense of humor? In a word—no. There are a few insights the young Jean-Paul Sartre stumbled upon back in the late 1930s when he wrote the slender novel that would one day win him a Nobel Prize he chose to reject. And they are riding on a few powerful ur-rails:

Nausea: the Prequel

1. Sartre’s unshakeable (pathological, actually) Cartesianism, broke up his metaphysical romance with Merleau-Ponty. Dualism as a premise would guarantee that whatever ontological starting point he chose, he would inevitably paint himself into a contradictory corner. Trapped in a world that could contain only mutually exclusive opposites,  Sartre put all his money on Consciousness, which in true Cartesian fashion was continuously hounded by Being (Descartes’ material substance).
2. Being was not Sartre’s friend (even though it became the main squeeze of one of his heroes, Heidegger). Being was thick, murky, too too solid stuff that threatened the purity, the squeaky-clean lightness of consciousness (Sartre’s riff on Descartes’ spiritual substance – anima).
3. Sartre lost his father when he was young, and forever felt “ungrounded.” i.e. spoiled, free from super-egoesque rules and restrictions.  He was, in his own words, “radically free.”
4. This was not a good thing, because….
5. Sartre was also short.
6. Sartre was wall-eyed.
7. Sartre was (by his own account) ugly.
8. Given all of the above, Sartre had issues with his physical being. The body was not his friend.  Being— as the source and matrix of Corporality, was an enemy to be struggled with.
9. Most importantly, for our purposes, Being (the bodily, the material, the fleshy, the viscous) was the source of la nausée.

Back to the book

Sartre wrote a verbose guidebook to the basic insights of La Nausée a few years later. It was a very big book called Being and Nothingness, the title basically saying it all.  In this modernist bellum omnium, embodiment and consciousness are locked in the sort of struggle that begins at the meta level, (cf.  Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason) and continues to unfurl into the fetid, fleshy folds of every carbon-based entity on the planet.

In Being and Nothingness, the nausea we can occasionally glimpse (here’s a possible bridge to that “mindfulness” analogy) breaks through only when we are not focused on any particular perception. It seeps through the semi-permeable membrane of our attention. It catches us when we literally aren’t looking. And in Sartre’s later, larger philosophical blockbuster, Nausea is what reveals our disgusting “isness” to our consciousness. It is the bad taste in the mouth left by the odd consciousness-altering experience in which the sheer arbitrariness of the human situation is revealed. And it is literally unbearable. It can’t be stomached. (NB: Sartre wrote La Nausée after a negative reaction to mescaline. His bad trip involved being pursued by giant crayfish and lobsters and ruined his culinary appreciation for Coquilles St. Jacques for the rest of his life. It is entirely possible that the shellfish, a creature who wears his “interior” on his outside, became the metaphor for this overpowering and sudden onslaught of existence.)

Existential Bulimia and the entire collected lyrics of Bob Dylan

 Nausea, Sartre-style, is nothing if not multi-layered.  Yes, it is the disgusting realization of our disgusting bodily being (or at least that of a 5 foot 4 inch wall-eyed Frenchman).  But it’s got other shape-shifting aspects as well.

Let’s zero in on the episode, buried in the heart of La Nausée, which first announced this seamy side of the human condition. The episode of the gnarled chestnut root. This first contact, if you will, with nausea occurs just as Roquentin—bored, restless, weary of cheap, meaningless sexual encounters—is heading home from a local bôite.  He takes a shortcut through a small park. His glance falls upon the gnarled trunk of a chestnut tree. Pretty soon the tree starts looking at him. (For phenomenological description, Sartre has no equal.) It’s unmistakable. The tree is in control. Roquentin cannot look away. (Think messy roadkill.) And that’s when it happens. The nausea. The sickly-sweet sensation that the root is just what existence is—a thing without any purpose, without any meaning or rationale. It simply exists. Trapped inside of Mobile with the Memphis blues again.

If this doesn’t shake you to your very DNA, then you are not the mother-loving Cartesian that Sartre is. In the Meditations, Descartes lays the groundwork for rationalism, the “let’s make sense of things” philosophy that would make the world safe for scientific method.  It is a template in which 2 and 2 really do equal 4, for all time and on every planet. It is a clean, sleek, tidy world that Descartes is founding—one in which simply by reasoning, we can discover why things are as they are. And believe me, not one hair is out of place in this Cartesian universe. Reassuring—sort of like your high school physics teacher in a postmodern educational context. Reassuring, soothing, and—as Roquentin is finding out—deceitful.

See that’s the deal here. That damned chestnut root flies in the face of all that clean Cartesian consciousness. It doesn’t have to exist. It didn’t ask to exist. It simply does exist. For no reason whatsoever.

Can you say “up-chuck” in French? Or, as Bob Dylan observed, “deep inside my heart I know I can’t escape—oh Mama can this really be the end?” Within nano-seconds, Roquentin realizes that he too is just one more chestnut root, existentially-speaking.

His own existence is also without reason, without inherent purpose, without innate properties. He too simply is—randomly, messily, unnecessarily.

Rooting Out the Origins of Deception

And that, mes amis, is why Roquentin/Sartre ends his pivotal book with a scene in which we hear a jazz record playing in the dingy bar. Why can’t my life be like that melody, Roquentin whines rhetorically? Why can’t my life have that sort of orderly purpose, like the notes in the melody, played in a particular order that gives meaning and structure to the whole? (In fact the concept of “manufactured normalcy” is tautologous by Sartrean standards. We manufacture the “normalcy” of whatever—March madness, online shopping, dating etiquette—in order to prevent random meaninglessness from seeping through.)

Addressing that rueful desire for order and purpose occupied Jean-Paul Sartre for the rest of his life.

So, in the end, the rush of Nausea actually propelled Sartre’s writings. It propelled his quest to seek, or at least create, some meaning for human existence—and as a passionate modernist, he would hand each individual the powerful gift of radical freedom to create the meaning of our own lives.  So the nauseating freedom (from meaning) of human existence was not completely negative. Au contraire. It also liberated us from innate ideas, from an inborn essence that would define us in advance of our own free choices.  But that’s a whole other issue. One that had become endangered during the rise of Borgian* Postmodernism.

[* Consult Star Trek: the Next Generation for examples of the Borg groupmind.]

Incidentally, anyone else who wants to do a discussion-note type guest post here on a book/source you think is related to a theme I explore frequently, the floor is yours.

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Both science fiction and futurism seem to miss an important piece of how the future actually turns into the present. They fail to capture the way we don’t seem to notice when the future actually arrives.

Sure, we can all see the small clues all around us: cellphones, laptops, Facebook, Prius cars on the street. Yet, somehow, the future always seems like something that is going to happen rather than something that is happening, present-continuous rather than future perfect. Even the nearest of near-term science fiction seems to evolve at some fixed receding-horizon distance from the present.

There is an unexplained cognitive dissonance between changing-reality-as-experienced and change as imagined, and I don’t mean specifics of failed and successful predictions.

My new explanation is this: we live in a continuous state of manufactured normalcy. There are mechanisms that operate — a mix of natural, emergent and designed — that work to prevent us from realizing that the future is actually happening as we speak.  To really understand the world and how it is evolving, you need to break through this manufactured normalcy field. Unfortunately, that leads, as we will see, to a kind of existential nausea.

The Manufactured Normalcy Field

Life as we live it has this familiar sense of being a static, continuous present. Our ongoing time travel (at a velocity of one second per second) never seems to take us to a foreign place. It is always 4 PM; it is always tea-time.

Of course, a quick look back to your own life ten or twenty years back will turn up all sorts of evidence that your life has, in fact, been radically transformed, both at a micro-level and the macro-level. At the micro-level, I now possess a cellphone that works better than Captain Kirk’s communicator, but I don’t feel like I am living in the future I imagined back then, even a tiny bit. For a macro example, back in the eighties, people used to paint scary pictures of the world with a few billion more people and water wars. I think I wrote essays in school about such things.  Yet we’re here now, and I don’t feel all that different, even though the scary predicted things are happening on schedule.  To other people (this is important).

Try and reflect on your life. I guarantee that you won’t be able to feel any big change in your gut, even if you are able to appreciate it intellectually. Feeling it in your gut means throwing up, as we’ll see.

The psychology here is actually not that interesting.  A slight generalization of normalcy bias and denial of black-swan futures is sufficient.  What is interesting is how this psychological pre-disposition to believe in an unchanging, normal present doesn’t kill us.

How, as a species, are we able to prepare for, create, and deal with, the future, while managing to effectively deny that it is happening at all?

Futurists, artists and edge-culturists like to take credit for this. They like to pretend that they are the lonely, brave guardians of the species who deal with the “real” future and pre-digest it for the rest of us.

But this explanation falls apart with just a little poking. It turns out that the cultural edge is just as frozen in time as the mainstream. It is just frozen in a different part of the time theater, populated by people who seek more stimulation than the mainstream, and draw on imagined futures to feed their cravings rather than inform actual future-manufacturing.

The two beaten-to-death ways of understanding this phenomenon are due to McLuhan (“We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.”) and William Gibson (“The future is already here; it is just unevenly distributed.”)

Both framing perspectives have serious limitations that I will get to. What is missing in both needs a name, so I’ll call the “familiar sense of a static, continuous present” a Manufactured Normalcy Field. For the rest of this post, I’ll refer to this as the Field for short.

So we can divide the future into two useful pieces: things coming at us that have been integrated into the Field, and things that have not. The integration kicks in at some level of ubiquity. Gibson got that part right.

Let’s call the crossing of the Field threshold by a piece of futuristic technology normalization (not to be confused with the postmodernist sense of the term, but related to the mathematical sense). Normalization involves incorporation of a piece of technological novelty into larger conceptual metaphors built out of familiar experiences.

A simple example is commercial air travel.

The Example of Air Travel

A great deal of effort goes into making sure passengers never realize just how unnatural their state of motion is, on a commercial airplane. Climb rates, bank angles and acceleration profiles are maintained within strict limits. Back in the day, I used to do homework problems to calculate these limits.

Airline passengers don’t fly. The travel in a manufactured normalcy field. Space travel is not yet common enough, so there is no manufactured normalcy field for it.

When you are sitting on a typical modern jetliner, you are traveling at 500 mph in an aluminum tube that is actually capable of some pretty scary acrobatics. Including generating brief periods of zero-g.

Yet a typical air traveler never experiences anything that one of our ancestors could not experience on a fast chariot or a boat.

Air travel is manufactured normalcy. If you ever truly experience what modern air travel can do, chances are, the experience will be framed as either a bit of entertainment (“fighter pilot for a day!” which you will understand as “expensive roller-coaster”) or a visit to an alien-specialist land (American aerospace engineering students who participate in NASA summer camps often get to ride on the “vomit comet” modified Boeing 727s that fly the zero-g training missions).

This means that even though air travel is now a hundred years old, it hasn’t actually “arrived” psychologically. A full appreciation of what air travel actually is, has been kept from the general population through manufactured normalcy.

All we’re left with is out-of-context data that we are not equipped to really understand in any deep way (“Oh, it used to take months to sail from India to the US in the seventeenth century, and now it takes a 17 hour flight, how interesting.“)

Think about the small fraction of humanity who have actually experienced air travel qua air travel, as a distinct mode from older means of transport. These include fighter pilots, astronauts and the few air travelers who have been part of a serious emergency that forced (for instance) an airliner to lose 10,000 feet of altitude in a few seconds.

Of course, manufactured normalcy is never quite perfect (passengers on the Concorde could see the earth’s curvature for instance), but the point is, it is good enough that behaviorally, we do not experience the censored future. We don’t have to actually learn the future in any significant way (what exactly have you “learned” about air travel that is not a fairly trivial port of a train-travel behavior?)

So the way the “future” of air travel in 1900 actually arrived was the following:

• A specialized future arrived for a subset who were trained and equipped with new mental models to comprehend it in the fullest sense, but in a narrowly instrumental rather than appreciative way. A fighter pilot does not necessarily experience flight the way a bird does.
• The vast majority started experiencing a manufactured normalcy, via McLuhan-esque extension of existing media
• Occasionally, the manufactured normalcy broke down for a few people by accident, who were then exposed to the “future” without being equipped to handle it

The Future Arrives via Specialization and Metaphor Expansion

So this is a very different way to understand the future: it doesn’t arrive in a temporal sense. It arrives mainly via social fragmentation. Specialization is how the future arrives.

And in many cases, arrival-via-specialization means psychological non-arrival. Not every element of the future brings with it a visceral human experience that at least a subset can encounter. There are no “pilots” in the arrival of cheap gene sequencing, for instance. At least not yet. When you can pay to grow a tail, that might change.

There is a subset of humanity that routinely does DNA sequencing and similar things everyday, but if the genomic future has arrived for them, it has arrived as a clean, purely cerebral-instrumental experience, transformed into a new kind of symbol-manipulation and equipment-operation expertise.

Arrival-via-specialization requires potential specialists. Presumably, humans with extra high tolerance for g-forces have always existed, and technology began selecting for that trait once airplanes were invented. This suggests that only those futures arrive for which there is human capacity to cope. This conclusion is not true, because a future can arrive before humans figure out whether they have the ability to cope. For instance, the widespread problem of obesity suggests that food-abundance arrived before we figured out that most of us cannot cope. And this is one piece of the future that cannot be relegated to specialists. Others cannot eat for you, even though others can fly planes for you.

So what about elements of the future that arrive relatively successfully for everybody, like cellphones? Here, the idea I called the Milo Criterion kicks in: successful products are precisely those that do not attempt to move user experiences significantly, even if the underlying technology has shifted radically.  In fact the whole point of user experience design is to manufacture the necessary normalcy for a product to succeed and get integrated into the Field. In this sense user experience design is reductive with respect to technological potential.

So for this bucket of experiencing the future, what we get is a Darwinian weeding out of those manifestations of the future that break the continuity of technological experience. So things like Google Wave fail.  Just because something is technically feasible does not mean it can psychologically normalized into the Field.

The Web arrived via the document metaphor. Despite the rise of the stream metaphor for conceptualizing the Web architecturally, the user-experience metaphor is still descended from the document.

The smartphone, which I understand conceptually these days via a pacifier metaphor, is actually nothing like a phone. Voice is just one clunky feature grandfathered into a handheld computer that is engineered to loosely resemble its nominal ancestor.

The phone in turn was a gradual morphing of things like speaking tubes. This line of descent has an element of conscious design, so technological genealogy is not as deterministic as biological genealogy.

The smartphone could have developed via metaphoric descent from the hand-held calculator; “Oh, I can now talk to people on my calculator” would have been a fairly natural way to understand it. That it was the phone rather than the calculator is probably partly due to path-dependency effects and partly due to the greater ubiquity of phones in mainstream life.

What Century Do We Actually Live In?

I haven’t done a careful analysis, but my rough, back-of-the-napkin working out of the implications of these ideas suggests that we are all living, in user-experience terms, in some thoroughly mangled, overloaded, stretched and precarious version of the 15th century that is just good enough to withstand casual scrutiny. I’ll qualify this a bit in a minute, but stay with me here.

What about edge-culturists who think they are more alive to the real oncoming future?

I am convinced that they frozen in time too. The edge today looks strangely similar to the edge in any previous century. It is basically defined by reactionary musical and sartorial tastes and being a little more outrageous than everybody else in challenging the prevailing culture of manners. Edge-dwelling is a social rather than technological phenomenon. If it reveals anything about technology or the future, it is mostly by accident.

Art occasionally rises to the challenge of actually cracking open a window onto the actual present, but mostly restricts itself to creating dissonance in the mainstream’s view of the imagined present, a relative rather than absolute dialectic.

Edge culturists end up living lives that are basically continuously repeated rehearsal loops for a future that never actually arrives.  They do experience a version of the future a little earlier than others, but the mechanisms they need to resort to are so cumbersome, that what they actually experience is the mechanisms rather than the future as it will eventually be lived.

For instance, the Behemoth, a futuristic bicycle built by Steven Roberts in 1991, had many features that have today actually arrived via the iPhone. So in a sense, Roberts didn’t actually experience the future ahead of us, because what shapes our experience of universal mobile communication definitely has nothing to do with a bicycle and a lot to do with pacifiers (I don’t think Roberts had a pacifier in the Behemoth).

At a more human level, I find that I am unable to relate to people who are deeply into any sort of cyberculture or other future-obsessed edge zone. There is a certain extreme banality to my thoughts when I think about the future. Futurists as a subculture seem to organize their lives as future-experience theaters. These theaters are perhaps entertaining and interesting in their own right, as a sort of performance art, but are not of much interest or value to people who are interested in the future in the form it might actually arise.

It is easy to make the distinction explicit. Most futurists are interested in the future beyond the Field. I am primarily interested in the future once it enters the Field, and the process by which it gets integrated into it. This is also where the future turns into money, so perhaps my motivations are less intellectual than they are narrowly mercenary.  This is also a more complicated way of making a point made by several marketers: technology only becomes interesting once it becomes technically boring. Technological futurists are pre-Fieldists. Marketing futurists are post-Fieldists.

This also explains why so few futurists make any money. They are attracted to exactly those parts of the future that are worth very little. They find visions of changed human behavior stimulating. Technological change serves as a basis for constructing aspirational visions of changed humanity. Unfortunately, technological change actually arrives in ways that leave human behavior minimally altered. 

Engineering is about finding excitement by figuring out how human behavior could change. Marketing is about finding money by making sure it doesn’t. The future arrives along a least-cognitive-effort path.

This actually suggests a different, subtler reading of Gibson’s unevenly-distributed line.

It isn’t that what is patchily distributed today will become widespread tomorrow. The mainstream never ends up looking like the edge of today. Not even close. The mainstream seeks placidity while the edge seeks stimulation.

Instead, what is unevenly distributed are isolated windows into the un-normalized future that exist as weak spots in the Field. When the windows start to become larger and more common, economics kicks in and the Field maintenance industry quickly moves to create specialists, codified knowledge and normalcy-preserving design patterns.

Time is actually a meaningless organizing variable here. Is gene-hacking more or less futuristic than pod-cities or bionic chips?

The future is simply a landscape defined by two natural (and non-temporal) boundaries. One separates the currently infeasible from the feasible (hyperspatial travel is unfortunately infeasible), and the other separates the normalized from the un-normalized. The Field is manufactured out of the feasible-and-normalized. We call it the present, but it is not the same as the temporal concept. In fact, the labeling of the Field as the ‘present’ is itself part of the manufactured normalcy. The labeling serves to hide a complex construction process underneath an apparently familiar label that most of us think we experience but don’t really (as generations of meditation teachers exhorting us to ‘live in the present’ try to get across; they mostly fail because their sense of time has been largely hijacked by a cultural process).

What gets normalized first has very little to do with what is easier, and a lot to do with what is more attractive economically and politically. Humans have achieved some fantastic things like space travel. They have even done things initially thought to be infeasible (like heavier-than-air flight) but other parts of a very accessible future lie beyond the Manufactured Normalcy Field, seemingly beyond the reach of economic feasibility forever.  As the grumpy old man in an old Reader’s Digest joke grumbled, “We can put a man on the moon, but we cannot get the jelly into the exact center of a jelly doughnut.”

The future is a stream of bug reports in the normalcy-maintenance software that keeps getting patched, maintaining a hackstable present Field.

Field Elasticity and Attenuation

A basic objection to my account of what you could call the “futurism dialectic” is that 2012 looks nothing like the fifteenth century, as we understand it today, through our best reconstructions.

My answer to that objection is simple: as everyday experiences get mangled by layer after layer of metaphoric back-referencing, these metaphors get reified into a sort of atemporal, non-physical realm of abstract experience-primitives.

These are sort of like Platonic primitives, except that they are reified patterns of behavior, understood with reference to a manufactured perception of reality. The Field does evolve in time, but this evolution is not a delayed version of “real” change or even related to it. In fact movement is a bad way to understand how the Field transforms. Its dynamic nature is best understood as a kind of stretching. The Field stretches to accommodate the future, rather than moving to cover it.

It stretches in its own design space: that of ever-expanding, reifying, conceptual metaphor. Expansion as a basic framing suggests an entirely different set of risks and concerns. We needn’t worry about acceleration. We need to worry about attenuation. We need not worry about not being able to “keep up” with a present that moves faster. We need to worry about the Field expanding to a breaking point and popping, like an over-inflated balloon. We need not worry about computers getting ever faster. We need to worry about the document metaphor breaking suddenly, leaving us unable to comprehend the Internet.

Dating the “planetary UX” to the fifteenth century is something like chronological anchoring of the genealogy of extant metaphors to the nearest historical point where some recognizable physical basis exists.  The 15th century is sort of the Garden of Eden of the modern experience of technology. It represents the point where our current balloon started to get inflated.

When we actually think of differences between historical periods, we tend to focus on the most superficial of human differences that have very little coupling to technological progress.

Quick, imagine the fifteenth century. You’re thinking of people in funny pants and hats right (if you’re of European descent. Mutatis mutandis if you are not)? Perhaps you are thinking of dimensions of social experience like racial diversity and gender roles.

Think about how trivial and inconsequential changes on those fronts are, compared to the changes on the technological front. We’ve landed on the moon, we screw around with our genes, we routinely fly at 30,000 feet at 500 mph. You can repeat those words a thousand times and you still won’t be able to appreciate the magnitude of the transformation the way you can appreciate the magnitude of a radical social change (a Black man is president of the United States!).

If I am still not getting through to you, imagine having a conversation over time-phone with someone living in 3000 BC. Assume there’s a Babel fish in the link. Which of these concepts do you think would be easier to get across?

1. In our time, women are considered the equal of men in many parts of the world
2. In our time, a Black man is the most powerful man in the world
3. In our time, we can sequence our genes
4. In our time, we can send pictures of what we see to our friends around the world instantly

Even if the 3000 BC guy gets some vague, magic-based sense of what item 4 means, he or she will have no comprehension of the things in our mental models behind that statement (Facebook, Instagram, the Internet, wireless radio technology). Item 3 will not be translatable at all.

But this does not mean that he does not understand your present. It means you do not understand your own present in any meaningful way. You are merely able to function within it.

Appreciative versus Instrumental Comprehension

If your understanding of the present were a coherent understanding and appreciation of your reality, you would be able to communicate it. I am going to borrow terms from John Friedman and distinguish between two sorts of conceptual metaphors we use to comprehend present reality: appreciative and instrumental.

Instrumental (what Friedman misleadingly called manipulative) conceptual metaphors are basic UX metaphors like “scrolling” web pages, or the metaphor of the “keypad” on a phone. Appreciative conceptual metaphors help us understand present realities in terms of their fundamental dynamics. So my use of the metaphor “smartphones are pacifiers” (it looks like a figurative metaphor, but once you get used to it, you find that it has the natural depth of a classic Lakoff conceptual metaphor) is an appreciative conceptual metaphor.

Instrumental conceptual metaphors allow us to function. Appreciative ones allow us to make sense of our lives and communicate such understanding.

So our failure to communicate the idea of Instagram to somebody in 3000 BC is due to an atemporal and asymmetric incomprehension: we possess good instrumental metaphors but poor appreciative ones.

So this failure has less to do with Arthur C. Clarke’s famous assertion that a sufficiently advanced technology will seem like magic to those from more primitive eras, and more to do with the fact that the Field actively prevents us from ever understanding our own present on its own terms.  We manage to function and comprehend reality in instrumental ways while falling behind in comprehending it in appreciative ways.

So my update to Clarke would be this: any sufficiently advanced technology will seem like magic to all humans at all times. Some will merely live within a Field that allow them to function within specific advanced technology environments.

Take item 4 for instance. After all, it is Instagram, a reference to a telegram. We understand Facebook in terms of school year-books. It is exactly this sort of pattern of purely instrumental comprehension that leads to the plausibility of certain types of Internet hoaxes, like the one that did the rounds recently about Abraham Lincoln having patented a version of the Facebook idea.

The fact that the core idea of Facebook can be translated to the language of Abe’s world of newspapers suggests that we are papering over (I had to, sorry) complicated realities with surfaces we can understand. The alternative conclusion is silly (that the technology underlying Facebook is not really more expressive than the one underlying newspapers).

Facebook is not a Yearbook. It is a few warehouse-sized buildings containing racks and racks of electronic hardware sheets, each containing etched little slivers of silicon at their core. Each of those little slivers contains more intricacy than all the jewelry designers in history together managed to put into all the earrings they ever made. These warehouses are connected via radio and optic-fiber links to….

Oh well, forget it. It’s a frikkin’ Yearbook that contains everybody. That’s enough for us to deal with it, even if we cannot explain what we’re doing or why to Mr. 3000 BC.

The Always-Unreal

Have you ever wondered why Alvin Toffler’s writings seem so strange today? Intellectually you can recognize that he saw a lot of things coming. But somehow, he imagined the future in future-unfamiliar terms. So it appears strange to us. Because we are experiencing a lot of what he saw coming, translated into terms that would actually have been completely familiar to him.

His writings seem unreal partly because they are impoverished imaginings of things that did not exist back then, but partly because his writing seems to be informed by the idea that the future would define itself. He speaks of future-concepts like (say) modular housing in terms that make sense with respect to those concepts.

When the future actually arrives, in the form of couchsurfing and Airbnb, it arrives translated into a crazed-familiarity. Toffler sort of got the basic idea that mobility would change our sense of home. His failure was not in failing to predict how housing might evolve. His failure was in failing to predict that we would comprehend it in terms of “Bed and Breakfast” metaphors.

This is not an indictment of Toffler’s skill as a futurist, but of the very methods of futurism. We build conceptual models of the world as it exists today, posit laws of transformation and change,  simulate possible futures, and cherry-pick interesting and likely-sounding elements that appear robustly across many simulations and appear feasible.

And then we stop. We do not transform the end-state conceptual models into the behavioral terms we use to actually engage and understand reality-in-use, as opposed to reality-in-contemplation. We forget to do the most important part of a futurist prediction: predicting how user experience might evolve to normalize the future-unfamiliar.

Something similar happens with even the best of science fiction.  There is a strangeness to the imagining that seems missing when the imagined futures actually arrive, pre-processed into the familiar.

But here, something slightly different plays out, because the future is presented in the context of imaginary human characters facing up to timeless Campbellian human challenges. So we have characters living out lives involving very strange behaviors in strange landscapes, wearing strange clothes, and so forth. This is what makes science fiction science fiction after all. George Lucas’ space opera is interesting precisely because it is not set in the Wild West or Mt. Olympus.

We turn imagined behavioral differences that the future might bring into entertainment, but when it actually arrives, we make sure the behavioral differences are minimized. The Field creates a suspension of potential disbelief.

So both futurism and science fiction are trapped in an always-unreal strange land that must always exist at a certain remove from the manufactured-to-be-familiar present. Much of present-moment science fiction and fantasy is in fact forced into parallel universe territory not because there are deep philosophical counterfactuals involved (a lot of Harry Potter magic is very functionally replicable by us Muggles) but because it would lose its capacity to stimulate. Do you really want to read about a newspaper made of flexible e-ink that plays black-and-white movies over WiFi? That sounds like a bad startup pitch rather than a good fantasy novel.

The Matrix was something of an interesting triumph in this sense, and in a way smarter than one of its inspirations, The Neuromancer, because it made Gibson’s cyberspace co-incident with a temporally frozen reality-simulacrum.

But it actually did not go far enough. The world of 1997 (or wherever the Matrix decided to hit ‘Pause’) was itself never an experienced reality.

1997 never happened. Neither did 1500 in a way. What we did have was different stretched states of the Manufactured Normalcy Field in 1500 and 1997. If the Matrix were to happen, it would have to actually keep that stretching going.

Breathless

There is one element of the future that does arrive on schedule, uncensored. This is its emotional quality. The pace of change is accelerating and we experience this as Field-stretching anxiety.

But emotions being what they are, we cannot separate future anxiety from other forms of anxiety. Are you upset today because your boss yelled at you or because subtle cues made the accelerating pace of change leak into your life as a tear in the Field?

Increased anxiety is only one dimension of how we experience change. Another dimension is a constant sense of crisis (which has, incidentally, always prevailed in history).

A third dimension is a constant feeling of chaos held at bay (another constant in history), just beyond the firewall of everyday routine (the Field is everyday routine).

Sometimes we experience the future via a basic individual-level “it won’t happen to me” normalcy bias. Things like SARS or dying in a plane crash are uncomprehended future-things (remember, you live in a manufactured reality that has been stretching since the fifteenth century)  that are nominally in our present, but haven’t penetrated the Field for most of us. Most of us substitute probability for time for such things. As time progresses, the long tail of the unexperienced future grows fatter. A lot more can happen to us in 2012 than in 1500, but we try to ensure that very little does happen.

The uncertainty of the future is about this long tail of waiting events that the Field hasn’t yet digested, but we know exists out there, as a space where Bad Things Happen to People Like Me but Never to Me.

In a way, when we ask, is there a sustainable future, we are not really asking about fossil fuels or feeding 9 billion people. We are asking can the Manufactured Normalcy Field absorb such and such changes?

We aren’t really tied to specific elements of today’s lifestyles. We are definitely open to change. But only change that comes to us via the Field. We’ve adapted to the idea of people cutting open our bodies, stopping our hearts and pumping our blood through machines while they cut us up. The Field has digested those realities. Various sorts of existential anesthetics are an important part of how the Field is manufactured and maintained.

Our sense of impending doom or extraordinary potential have to do with the perceived fragility or robustness of the Field.

It is possible to slide into a sort of technological solipsism here and declare that there is no reality; that only the Field exists. Many postmodernists do exactly that.

Except that history repeatedly proves them wrong. The Field is distinct from reality. It can and does break down a couple of times in every human lifetime. We’re coming off a very long period — since World War II — of Field stability. Except for a few poor schmucks in places like Vietnam, the Field has been precariously preserved for most of us.

When larger global Fields break, we experience “dark” ages. We literally cannot process change at all. We grope, waiting for an age when it will all make sense again.

So we could be entering a Dark Age right now, because most of us don’t experience a global Field anymore. We live in tiny personal fields. We can only connect socially with people whose little-f fields are similar to ours.  When individual fields also start popping, psychic chaos will start to loom.

The scary possibility in the near future is not that we will see another radical break in the Field, but a permanent collapse of all fields, big and small.

The result will be a state of constant psychological warfare between the present and the future, where reality changes far too fast for either a global Field or a personal one to keep up. Where adaptation-by-specialization turns into a crazed, continuous reinvention of oneself for survival. Where the reinvention is sufficient to sustain existence financially, but not sufficient to maintain continuity of present-experience.  Instrumental metaphors will persist while appreciative ones will collapse entirely.

The result will be a world population with a large majority of people on the edge of madness, somehow functioning in a haze where past, present and future form a chaotic soup (have you checked out your Facebook feed lately) of drunken perspective shifts.

This is already starting to happen. Instead of a newspaper feeding us daily doses of a shared Field, we get a nauseating mix of news from forgotten classmates, slogan-placards about issues trivial and grave, revisionist histories coming at us via a million political voices, the future as a patchwork quilt of incoherent glimpses, all mixed in with pictures of cats doing improbable things.

The waning Field, still coming at us through weakening media like television, seems increasingly like a surreal zone of Wonderland madness.

We aren’t being hit by Future Shock. We are going to be hit by Future Nausea.  You’re not going to be knocked out cold. You’re just going to throw up in some existential sense of the word. I’d like to prepare. I wish some science fiction writers would write a few nauseating stories.

Welcome to the Future Nauseous.

For the record, I haven’t read Sartre’s novel ‘Nausea.’ From Wikipedia, it seems vaguely related to my use of the term. I might read it. If somebody has read it, please help connect some dots here.

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I’ve been experimenting lately with aphorisms. Pithy one-liners of the sort favored by writers like La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680). My goal was to turn a relatively big idea, the sort I would normally turn into a 4000-word post, into a one-liner. After many failed attempts over the last few months, a few weeks ago, I finally managed to craft one I was happy with:

Civilization is the process of turning the incomprehensible into the arbitrary.

Many hours of thought went into this 11-word candidate for eternal quotability. When I was done, I was tempted to immediately unpack it in a longer essay, but then I realized that that would defeat the purpose. Maxims and aphorisms are about more than terseness in the face of expensive writing technology. They are about basic training in literacy. The aphorism above is possibly the most literate thing I have ever written. By stronger criteria I’ll get to, it might even be the only literate thing I’ve ever written, which means I’ve been illiterate until now.

This post isn’t about the aphorism itself (I’ll leave you to play with it), but about literacy.

I used to think that the terseness of  written language through most of history was mostly a result of the high cost and low reliability of writing technologies in pre-modern times. I now think these were secondary issues. I have come to believe that the very word literacy meant something entirely different before around 1890, when print technology became cheap enough to sustain a written form of mass media.

Literacy as Sophistication

Literacy used to be a very subtle concept that meant linguistic sophistication. It used to denote a skill that could be developed to arbitrary levels of refinement through practice.  Literacy meant using mastery over language — both form and content — to sustain a relentless and increasingly sophisticated pursuit of greater meaning. It was about an appreciative, rather than instrumental use of language. Language as a means of seeing rather than as a means of doing.

Reading and writing — the ability to translate language back and forth between oral and written forms — was  a secondary matter. It was a vocational pursuit of limited depth.

The written form itself was merely a convenience for transmitting language across space and time, and a mechanism by which to extend the limits of working memory. It had little to do with language skills per se.

Confusing the two is like confusing the ability to read and write musical notation with musical ability. You can have exceptional musical ability without knowing how to read music. And conversely, you might have no musical ability whatsoever, but still be able to read and write musical notation and translate back and forth between the keyboard and paper. Being able to read and write musical notation really has almost nothing to do with musical ability.

When writing was expensive, conflating the two skills (two-way translation and sophisticated use) was safe and useful. If somebody knew how to read and write, you could safely assume that he or she was also a sophisticated user of language.

It was never considered a necessary condition though, merely a sufficient one. A revealing sign is that many religious messiahs have been illiterate in the reading/writing sense, and have had scribes hanging on their every word, eagerly transcribing away for posterity.

Exposition and Condensation

Before Gutenberg, you demonstrated true literacy not by reading a text out aloud and taking down dictation accurately, but through exposition and condensation.

You were considered literate if you could take a classic verse and expound upon it at length (exposition) and take an ambiguous idea and distill its essence into a terse verbal composition (condensation).

Exposition was more than meaning-extraction. It was a demonstration of contextualized understanding of the text, skill with both form and content, and an ability to separate both from meaning in the sense of reference to non-linguistic realities.

Condensation was the art of packing meaning into the fewest possible words. It was a higher order skill than exposition. All literate people could do some exposition, but only masters could condense well enough to produce new texts considered worthy of being added to the literary tradition.

Exposition and condensation are in fact the fundamental learned behaviors that constitute literacy, not reading and writing. One behavior dissolves densely packed words using the solvent that is the extant oral culture, enriching it, while the other distills the essence into a form that can be transmitted across cultures.

Two literate people in very different different cultures, if they are skilled at exposition, might be able to expand the same maxim (the Golden Rule for instance) into different parables. Conversely, the literary masters of an era can condense stories and philosophies discovered in their own time into culturally portable nuggets.

So the terseness of an enduring maxim is as much about cross-cultural generality as it is about compactness.

The right kind of terseness allows you to accomplish a difficult transmission challenge: transmission across cultures and mental models. Reading and writing by contrast, merely accomplish transmission across time and space. They are much simpler inventions than exposition and condensation. Cultural distance is a far tougher dimension to navigate than spatial and temporal dimensions. By inventing a method to transmit across vast cultural distances, our earliest neolithic ancestors accidentally turned language into a tool for abstract thinking (it must have existed before then as a more rudimentary tool for communication, as in other species that possess more basic forms of language).

So how did we come to focus on reading and writing? Why is it reading, ‘riting and ‘rithmetic and not exposition, condensation and arithmetic?

Reading and Writing

Today the ability to read and write is ubiquitous in the developed world, and what was once a safe conflation of literacy and transcription ability has become more than meaningless. It has become actively dangerous.

To see why, it is useful to consider the relative status of the spoken word with respect to the written word in pre-modern times.

Before Gutenberg, reading and writing were considered not just secondary skills, but lowly ones, much as typing in the days before personal computing. It is revealing that the first designs for a personal computer at Xerox included one that had no keyboard next to the monitor, but was equipped instead with a dictaphone connection to a secretary who did any typing necessary. It was assumed that executives would not want to do their own typing, but would watch the action scroll by on a monitor.

Reading and writing were for students and scribes. Career scribes were not scholars. Reading and writing skills by themselves represented a vocation, not learning.

Where both the written and spoken word could be used, the latter was in fact preferred. Scholars demonstrated linguistic virtuosity through the spoken rather than the written word. When they gained enough prominence, they acquired students and scribes who would do the lowly work of translation between oral and written forms in exchange for the privilege of learning from a master.

But we haven’t explained why the spoken word was preferred. What has confused us is the red herring of preservation through memorization. If preservation through memorization were the only purpose of oral cultures, they should have all vanished long ago. As McLuhan famously argued, it wasn’t until the Gutenberg revolution that the spoken word was finally dethroned by the written word.

The traditional explanation for the mysterious persistence of oral cultures has been that pre-Gutenberg written-word technologies were either too expensive to be generally accessible, or simply not reliable enough. The characteristic practices of oral cultures, by this theory, evolved to aid accurate preservation through memorization.

This is a bit like saying that people continued to eat fresh foods after refrigeration was invented because early refrigerators were not reliable enough or inexpensive enough to allow everybody to eat frozen foods.

The memorization-for-preservation explanation falls apart when you poke a little. You find that typical oral cultures contain practices that we moderns loosely label “memorization” because we don’t understand what they actually accomplish.

I am going to use Indian oral culture as an example because it is the one I know best, and because it possesses some illuminating extreme features. But I suspect you will find similar unexplained complexity in every oral culture, particularly ones associated with major religions, such as Latin.

Oral Cultural is Not About Memorization

This was a radical realization for me: oral culture is not about preservation-by-memorization. One strong piece of evidence can be found in this Wikipedia description of “memorization” practices in ancient India. Ignore the commentary and pay attention to the actual descriptions of the recitation techniques:

Prodigious energy was expended by ancient Indian culture in ensuring that these texts were transmitted from generation to generation with inordinate fidelity. For example, memorization of the sacred Vedas included up to eleven forms of recitation of the same text. The texts were subsequently “proof-read” by comparing the different recited versions. Forms of recitation included the jaṭā-pāṭha (literally “mesh recitation”) in which every two adjacent words in the text were first recited in their original order, then repeated in the reverse order, and finally repeated again in the original order. The recitation thus proceeded as:

In another form of recitation, dhvaja-pāṭha (literally “flag recitation”) a sequence of N words were recited (and memorized) by pairing the first two and last two words and then proceeding as:

The most complex form of recitation, ghana-pāṭha (literally “dense recitation”), took the form:

Original: Civilization is the process of turning the incomprehensible into the arbitrary.

Mesh recitation: civilization is, is civilization, civilization is, the process, process the, the process, of turning, turning of, of turning…

Flag recitation: civilization is, the arbitrary, is the, into the, the process, incomprehensible into, process of, the incomprehensible…

Dense recitation: civilization is, is civilization, civilization is the, the is civilization, civilization is the, is the, the is, is the process, process the is, is the process…

If you are practicing eleven different forms of combinatorial recitation, there is clearly something going on beyond preservation-by-memorization. One piece of evidence is that though the Vedas were accurately preserved, the oral culture also sustained torrents of secondary expository literature that was not accurately preserved. The Mahabharata is an example. Not only was no canonical version preserved, there was no canonical version. The thing grew like a Wikipedia of mythological fan-fiction.

From my own experiences with memorization, the recitation routines seem like extreme overkill. Straightforward repetition, aided by meter and rhyme, is sufficient if preservation-by-memorization (as an alternative to unreliable writing), is the only goal. I memorized two Shakespeare plays that way (though admittedly I have now forgotten most of them).

So what is going on here?

Recitation as Creative Destruction

Once you try this out loud, you realize what is happening. This is microcosmic creative destruction. Try to do this sort of recitation really mindlessly. You will find it extraordinarily difficult. The recitation patterns will force you to pay attention to meaning as well.

Far from being about mindless rote memorization, recitation is about mindful attention to a text.

You’re taking a permutations-and-combinations blender to the words, juxtaposing them in new ways, and actively performing combinatorial processing. You are rigorously testing the strength of every single word choice and ordering decision. You are isolating and foregrounding different elements of the logical content, such as implication, subject-verb and verb-object agreement, and so forth. There is an functional-aesthetic element too. Terseness does not preclude poetry (and therefore, redundancy). In fact it requires it. Despite the compactness of a text, room must be made for various useful symmetries.

If the original has any structural or semantic weaknesses at all, this torture will reveal it. If the original lacks the robustness that poetry brings, it will be added.

Not only does all this not help plain memorization, I claim that it makes it harder. You destabilize the original line in your head and turn it into a word soup. If the original is any way confused or poorly ordered, you will soon end up in a state of doubt about which sequence of words is the correct one.

For many students, practicing recitation must have been mindless tedium, but for a few, it would have catalyzed active consideration and reworking of the underlying ideas, in search of new wisdom. These students must have evolved into new masters, the source of beneficial mutations and crossovers in the cultural memeplexes they were charged with preserving.

Being forced to juggle words like this must have helped cultivate a clear awareness of the distinction between form and content. It must have helped cultivate an appreciation of language as a medium for performance rather than a medium for transmission or preservation. It must have forced students to pay careful attention to precision of word choice in their own compositions. It must have sustained a very mindful linguistic culture.

The analogy to music is again a useful one. The description of the varied forms of recitation sounds less like tedious memorization and more like music students practicing their scales. The only reason that you remember the basic scale (do re mi fa so la te do in Western solfege notation) is that the sequence has the simplest and most complete progression among all the permutations and combinations of the notes. But if you could only sing the one pattern, you wouldn’t be a musician (actually, there is more than an analogy here; music and language are clearly deeply related, but I haven’t thought that idea through).

Being only able to faithfully transcribe between oral and written forms is rather like being only able to sing the default do-re-me sequence. The former can no more be a true measure of literacy than the latter can be a measure of musical ability.

The only way the original can survive such mangling is if it is actually a beautifully dense condensation that has a certain robust memetic stability. At the risk of losing most of you, I think of a carefully composed set of related aphorisms as eigenvectors spanning a space of meaning. It is the space itself, and the competence to explore it, that define a literate comprehension of the text. Not the ability to reproduce or translate between written and oral forms.

We can make a fairly strong claim:

Oral cultures are not just, or even primarily, about quality assurance in transmission. They are primarily about quality assurance in composition, and training in the basic moves of exposition and condensation. 

When you think about it this way, there is no mystery. Oral culture persisted long after the development of writing because it was not about accurate preservation. It was about performance and cultural enactment through exposition and condensation.

The Costs of Gutenberg

And then Gutenberg happened.

The results were not immediately apparent. The old culture of literacy persisted for several centuries. The tipping point came in the 1890s, when printing technology became sufficiently cheap to support mass media (there is a world of difference between ubiquity of bibles and a culture of daily newspapers).

So sometime in the twentieth century, we lost all the subtlety of oral culture, turned our attention to the secondary vocational skills of reading and writing, and turned literacy into a set of mechanical tests.

Today, to be literate simply means that you can read and write mechanically, construct simple grammatical sentences, and use a minimal, basic (and largely instrumental) vocabulary.  We have redefined literacy as a 0-1 condition rather than a skill that can be indefinitely developed.

Gutenberg certainly created a huge positive change. It made the raw materials of literary culture widely accessible. It did not, however, make the basic skills of literacy, exposition and condensation, more ubiquitous.

Instead, a secondary vocational craft from the world of oral cultures (one among many) was turned into the foundation of all education, both high-culture liberal education and the vocational education that anchors popular culture.

The Fall of High Culture

I won’t spend much time on high culture, since the story should be familiar to everybody, even if this framing is unfamiliar.

The following things happened.

• Instead of condensing new knowledge into wisdom, we began encrypting it into jargon.
• Exposition as creative performance gave way to critical study as meaning-extraction.
• The art of condensation turned into the art of light, witty party banter.
• Conversation turned into correspondence and eventually into citation.
• Natural philosophy turned into science, and lost its literary character.
• Interpretation and re-enactment became restricted to narrowly political ends.
• Poetry was transformed from an intermediate-level literacy skill to a medium for self-indulgence.

The result of these changes on high culture was drastic. Discovery began to outpace interpretation and comprehension. We began to discover more and more, but know less and less. Science seceded from the rest of culture and retreated behind walls of jargon. The impoverished remains outside those walls were re-imagined as a shrill and frozen notion of humanism.

Mathematics and programming, two specialized derivatives of language that I consider part of high culture, retained the characteristics of oral cultures of old, with an emphasis on recombinant manipulation, terseness, generality and portability.

Both are now being threatened (by increasingly capable forms of computing). I will leave that story for another day.

The Fall of Popular Culture

But it is perhaps the transformation of popular culture that has been most dramatic. If you have ever talked to an intelligent and articulate, but illiterate (in the modernist reading-writing sense) member of a popular folk culture that has been relatively well-shielded from modern mass culture, you will understand just how dumb the latter is.

Pre-modern folk cultures are as capable as their high-culture cousins of sustaining linguistic traditions based on exposition and condensation. They are the linguistic minor leagues in relation to the major leagues of high culture, not spectator-cultures.

A pre-modern village does not rely, for intellectual sustenance, on stories brought from imperial capital cities by royal bards. At best, a few imported elements from distant imperial cultures become political integration points within larger grand narratives. I encountered a curious example of this sort of thing in Bali: a minor character in the Mahabharata, Sahadeva, apparently serves as the integration point between the localized version of Hinduism and purely local elements like the Barong and Rangda, which do not appear anywhere in the Mahabharata to my knowledge.

By contrast, modern mass culture is a spectator culture, linguistically speaking. You read stories but you do not necessarily attempt to rewrite them. You watch movies, but you do not attempt to re-enact them as plays that incorporate elements of local culture. The analogy to music is again useful. Before the gramaphone and radio, most families around the world made their own music.

The effects of print, radio and television based mass media were to basically destroy popular literary (but not necessarily written) cultures everywhere. Was it an accident or an act of deliberate cultural violence?

I believe it was an accident that proved so helpful for the industrial world that repairs were never made, like smallpox decimating the ranks of Native Americans.

For the industrial world, exposition and condensation were useless skills in the labor force. The world needed workers who could follow instructions: texts with one instrumental meaning instead of many appreciative meanings:

•  Turn on Switch A.
• Watch for the green light to come on.
• Then push the lever. 

As the finely differentiated universe of local folk cultures was gradually replaced by a handful of mass, popular cultures, ordinary citizens lost their locally enacted linguistic cultures, and began to feed passively on mass-produced words. In the process, they also lost the basic skills of literacy: exposition and condensation, and partially regressed to pre-Neolithic levels of linguistic sophistication, where language sustains social interaction and communication, but not critical, abstract thought.

What does this world look like?

Can the Gollum Speak?

I previously proposed the Gollum as an archetype of an ordinary person turned into a ghost by consumer culture.  What I am talking about here is the linguistic aspect of that transformation.

If you consider the decline of popular literary culture and its replacement by mass culture a sort of “consumerization of language,” you have to ask, can highly gollumized people use language in a literate way at all?

The Gollum can read, write and repeat, but I’ve slowly concluded that it cannot actually think with language. And not because it isn’t smart, but because it has been “educated.”

Everywhere around me I find examples of written and spoken language that I find bizarrely Frankenstein-monster like. Clumsy constructions based on borrowed parts, and rudely assembled (PR pitches and resume cover letters are great examples of modern Frankenstein writing).

The language of the true Gollum is a language of phrases borrowed and repeated but never quite understood.

Words and phrases turn into mechanical incantations that evoke predictable responses from similarly educated minds. Yes there is meaning here, but it is not precise meaning in the sense of a true literary culture. Instead it is a vague fog of sentiment and intention that shrouds every spoken word. It is more expressive than the vocalizations of some of our animal cousins, but not by  much.

Curiously, I find the language of illiterate (reading-writing sense) to usually be much clearer. When I listen to some educated people talk, I get the curious feeling that the words don’t actually matter. That it is all a behaviorist game of aversion and attraction and basic affect overlaid on the workings of a mechanical process. That mechanical process is enacted by instrumental meaning-machines manufactured in schools to generate, and respond appropriately to, a narrow class of linguistic stimuli without actually understanding anything.

When I am in a public space dominated by mass culture and its native inhabitants, such as a mall, I feel like I am surrounded by philosophical zombies.  Yes, they talk and listen, but it is not clear to me that what they are using is language.

And it isn’t just the I’m like, duh, and she’s like uh-oh crowd that I am talking about. I am including here the swarms of barely-literate (in the thinking sense) liberal arts graduates who can read and write phrases like always-already and dead-white-male (why not already-always or deceased-European man? I suspect Derrida and Foucault could tell you, but none of the millions who parrot them could).

This might sound like engineering elitism, but I find that the only large classes of people who appear to actually think in clearly literate ways today are mathematicians and programmers. But they typically only do so in very narrow domains.

To learn to think with language, to become literate in the sense of linguistically sophisticated, you must work hard to unlearn everything built on the foundation of literacy-as-reading-and-writing.

Because modern education is not designed to produce literate people. It is designed to produce programmable people. And this programmability requires less real literacy with every passing year. Today, genuinely literate reading and writing are specialized arts. Increasingly, even narrowly instrumental read-write literacy is becoming unnecessary (computers can do both very well).

These are not stupid people. You only have to listen to a child delightedly reciting supercalifragilisticexpialidocious or indulging in other childish forms of word-play to realize that raw skill with language is a native capability in the human brain. It must be repressed by industrial education since it seeks natural expression.

So these are not stupid people. These are merely ordinary people who have been lobotomized via the consumerization of language, delivered via modern education.

We dimly realize that we have lost something. But appreciation for the sophistication of oral cultures mostly manifests itself as mindless reverence for traditional wisdom. We look back at the works of ancients and deep down, wonder if humans have gotten fundamentally stupider over the centuries.

We haven’t. We’ve just had some crucial meme-processing software removed from our brains.

Towards a Literacy Renaissance

This is one of the few subjects about which I am not a pessimist. I believe that something strange is happening. Genuine literacy is seeing a precarious rebirth.

The best of today’s tweets seem to rise above the level of mere bon mots (“gamification is the high-fructose corn syrup of user engagement”) and achieve some of the cryptic depth of esoteric verse forms of earlier ages.

The recombinant madness that is the fate of a new piece of Internet content, as it travels, has some of the characteristics of the deliberate forms of recombinant recitation practiced by oral culture.

The comments section of any half-decent blog is a meaning factory.

Sites like tvtropes.org are sustaining basic literacy skills.

The best of today’s stand-up comics are preserving ancient wordplay skills.

But something is still missing: the idea that literacy is a cultivable skill. That dense, terse thoughts are not just serendipitous finds on the discursive journeys of our brains, but the product of learnable exposition and condensation skills.

I suppose paying attention to these things, and actually attempting to work with archaic forms like maxims and aphorisms in 2012 is something of a quixotic undertaking. When you can store a terbayte of information (about 130,000 books, or about 50% larger than a typical local public library) on a single hard-disk words can seem cheap.

But try reading some La Rochefoucauld, or even late hold outs like Oliver Wendell Holmes and J. B. S. Haldane, and you begin to understand what literacy is really about. The cost of words is not the cost of storing them or distributing, but the cost of producing them. Words are cheap today because we put little effort into their production, not because we can store and transmit as much as we like.

It is as yet too early to declare a literacy renaissance, but one can hope.

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It’s that time of the year again. Last year, sponsorships amounted to about $2000 (not counting  the “buy me a coffee” micro-payments, which added another $400). This year, they’ve already crossed the $500 mark without me doing a call.

Sponsorship and “coffee” money represent a fairly small fraction of my income, but on a dumb-money to smart-money spectrum, it is the smartest money I make.  I’d trade two dollars of any other kind of income for a dollar of sponsorship income any day. The “smart” in the smart money is the unadultrated goodwill it carries. Though there are no strings attached, I feel a strong urge to reinvest sponsorship income back into the blog and related activities rather than using it to pay the bills. In a way, the money comes with the opposite of a moral hazard attached.

So if you were considering sponsoring this year, consider this your cue and sponsor away.

When I did the call last year, I shared a line (the only line, actually) from my fledgling business philosophy: go where the wild thoughts are.

This year, I’ve added another line: go deep, young man.  At 37, I think I get to call myself young man for at least another three years.

Read on for more, if you are interested in my evolving philosophy of blogging. If you are a blogger yourself, chances are you won’t learn much. I am increasingly realizing that my approach to blogging says more about me than about blogging. If you’re not a blogger, this is your annual peek behind the scenes.

Life is Long and Blogging is Young

The big thing  on my mind last year, when I did my first annual call for sponsorships, was paid members-only communities, the topic du jour at the time. My big realization was that I really disliked the idea.

At the same time, I recognized that many other bloggers did have a legitimate reason for doing such communities. One of them, Dan Andrews, is in fact one of my sponsors (two years running). He runs a great members-only community, and the model fits what he does perfectly.

But the idea just seemed wrong for ribbonfarm. Thinking about wilderness areas helped me figure out why.

This year, another big thing is on my mind, but I haven’t heard others talking about it: the thought that blogging is very young and most of us in the game have a long life ahead of us to think about. Life is long and blogging is young. 

Even Dave Winer (the original blogger in the strict, modern, post-RSS sense of the world) has only been at it for fifteen years.

The original pro-blogger, Darren Rowse, has been at it since 2002, or ten years. He was born in 1972.

Come July, I will have been it for five years. I was born in 1974.

I would guess that the age distribution of pro-bloggers — defined as “people whose financial life depends directly or indirectly on blogging” —  probably has its peak in the mid 30s. This means that most of us in this boat have at least another 30 years of financial life ahead of us.

Our personal life futures are twice as long as the entire history of blogging to date. Nobody has yet completed what could be a called a full career in blogging. There are many memoirs by writers, but none by bloggers.

It is a sobering thought. It suggests none of us knows what the hell he/she is doing.

As a useful comparison, when my dad graduated as a mechanical engineer in 1959, the profession had been in existence for about 150 years and mature for 79 years (the ASME was founded in 1880). He knew what he was getting into, and largely got what he expected.

Most of us bloggers haven’t been thinking about the long-term future at all, because it is so uncertain. I don’t even mean this in the retirement planning sense (that’s definitely in the toilet for me, for the time being). I mean in the more basic sense of what will I be doing in 2034, when I hit 60?  My dad (and most of your parents) probably had a fairly good idea. An increasing number of us (not just bloggers) have no idea. I could be living in a homeless shelter, or a mansion.

“Blogging” somehow seems like too insubstantial an answer to the 2034 question. It seems more pragmatic to think of it as just an aspect of running a business in the traditional sense. A functional, instrumental activity that falls under marketing as a cost, driving other things like entrepreneurship.

Maybe for some. There are certainly content-marketers, entrepreneur-bloggers, VC-bloggers and others whose readership dwarfs mine. But this instrumental view of blogging still strikes me as far too unromantic.

Blogging doesn’t just feel like an ancillary activity to those of us who do it seriously. It feels like the core activity. It feels like the thing that anchors our economic identity. Calling it “marketing for something else” is like calling book-writing a marketing strategy for the speaker-circuit industry (true in a financial sense for many, but no good book writer I know has priorities set up that way).

I may (in fact I will have to) do other things. Lots of other things if I want to continue to pay the rent. But the core game I’d like to keep playing is blogging.

The Long Game

So what is the state of play? What is the long game that pro-bloggers must work on if they want to be around in 2039 doing something that is a recognizable descendant of blogging?

It is hard to say because so much of relevance to the game has happened even in just the last five years.

Not only is RSS no longer the defining element of blogging, it is not even a particularly relevant element for most end-users (I think in a few years, it will turn into middle-ware technology for various delivery mechanisms).

The rise of the Kindle has already changed the long-form content game and is now taking on shorter forms. My first book Tempo has, in its first year, weathered the decisive overtaking of paperbacks by ebooks. My next book will almost certainly be ebook-first.

The looming rise of active, rich content — animations and zoomable infographics for example — threatens to change the game further.  Video is starting to explode.  Social diffusion technology is still very unstable. A few years ago, you had to ride the RSS-to-Twitter switch. Then a Facebook presence became important. Now Google+ is changing the nature of organic search.

Mobile devices were mostly irrelevant when I started. Then belatedly, I added a mobile-friendly theme to my WordPress site. Today, mobile-device traffic is over 10% of all traffic. Two years ago, it was less than 5%.  Before that, mobile was no more than a rounding error. The change has been so rapid that Wired even proclaimed two years ago, in a nice bit of rhetorical exaggeration, that The Web is Dead.

And don’t forget aging infrastructure. PHP is already an old language and WordPress a mature product. There is a very high likelihood that both will decline and die before most of today’s bloggers do. And in the transition to whatever comes after, chances are, the game will change yet again.

Many people adopt a naively classicist attitude: all that stuff doesn’t matter. Just focus on creating the best content you can and the rest will take care of itself.

Except that it doesn’t.

At least not if you want to build your financial life on top of blogging.  Changes in media kill entire generations of content producers who fail to adapt, as many silent movie stars discovered when audio hit the movies.

At the other extreme, there are bloggers who ignore content altogether, and work furiously to keep up with the rapid evolution of the medium. They know all the latest SEO tricks, are the first to figure out every new distribution channel, and experiment with every new idea. But their content stays stupendously crappy in every medium — the same old list posts (Now available as an e-Book and an app!!!) and Three Marketing Lessons from William Shatner type dreck.

Any idiot can toil away at the thankless task of producing great content that the world then fails to appreciate, let alone pay for. Any idiot can get tech-happy and run like crazy to keep up with every tiny development.

It takes serious work to figure out how to balance the two concerns.

Especially if you want to stay in the game for the long-haul: 30-40 years.

Very few will succeed at this balancing act.  Heck, most don’t even want to.  They’re doing it because they realize they have to.

That might be what makes my situation different. You see, I actually like doing this and want to keep doing it. I actively resent it when other activities cannibalize my blogging energy. I get depressed when I am forced to do things that align poorly with blogging, simply to make money.

A Coffee Date for 2050

I like doing ribbonfarm. I would like to keep doing it for the rest of my life, whatever form the underlying technology takes, be it a website or a telepathic broadcast to readers with the iPhone56 implanted inside their heads.

I would like to spend more and more time doing ribbonfarm. I’d like to continue doing it until dementia and arthritis (assuming keyboards survive the transition to digitally-enabled telepathy) stop me. It is not so much a project as the persistent anchor thread in my life, that stays with me as other projects come and go.

Some of you have been reading this site since Day 1, and I am constantly surprised by the number of people who don’t seem to go away after an initial bout of reading.

Some day, maybe in 2050 if I live that long, I’d like to get together, over immersive-holographic telepresence at my local Starbucks, with the 3.5 people who would have, by that point, stayed with me for five decades instead of just five years. I would like to reflect on the journey with those 3.5 people, and laugh gleefully at the people we’ve managed to outlive. After that conversation, in a lucid hour between bouts of senile and  incoherent yelling at my Obamacare robotic nurse (I’ll probably have the Walmart store brand rather than the high-end Roomba branded one), I would like to do one final post and hang up my spurs for good.  Some crotchety old reader will no doubt complain in the comments that I never did finish the Gervais Principle, which will at that point, have dragged on to Part XXXV without explaining Toby satisfactorily. 

Realistically, I’d put the chances of this scenario playing out at about 10%.  Surviving that long in this game is a very low-probability proposition, financially speaking.

I would say 90% of serious bloggers today are not going to be able to make blogging a lifelong calling. I have no reason to believe I am special, so while I’d like to make that 2050 date with whoever plans to attend, and give surviving that long my best shot, it is also going to be a long shot.

My best shot involves going deep.

Back in the the nineteenth century, they used to say, Go West, Young Man.

Today, the best advice I can give myself is Go Deep. What does this mean?

Going Deep

Going deep means understanding the evolving digital landscape in human terms, and situating my actions in a human rather than technological context. It means building interesting relationships rather than Klout. It means paying attention to economic fundamentals — financial and social capital in particular — rather than follower counts and RSS subscription numbers.

This also fundamentally means taking it slow and easy. I have no traffic, analytics, income or sponsorship targets. This grows (or declines) at the rate it wants to, with no artificial acceleration.

I stopped paying attention to the numbers a long time ago. I rarely log into Google Analytics anymore. I only do it when people ask me about my vital stats. If you’re curious, I’ve had 32k visits/22k visitors in the last month and my RSS subscriber count has been hovering around the 4,500 mark for about a year. My bounce rate is 5.3% (this always shocks people who understand what it means), and I get about a third each of my traffic from organic search, referrals and direct visits.

But managing any function of those numbers is like managing the stock price of a company. It will inevitably detract from managing the blog (or company) itself.

I stopped caring not because those numbers aren’t important. They are just not important in the long game. Who knows what surface numbers will matter in 10 or 20 years or what analytics model will measure reader engagement over brain-implant telepathy links?

Going deep is about adding substance, context and narrative to relationships with individual readers and evolving content themes that start out as paint-by-numbers constructs.

On the people front, at what point does a reader initially labeled as (say) RSS subscriber #4482 acquire a name and a voice? At what point does he or she become a memory of a coffee or lunch owed? At what point does he or she become a friend or a co-conspirator on some project?

On the content front, at what point does a average article become a minor viral hit that is worth examining for deeper significance? At what point does a traffic spike change the nature of the comments conversation? At what point does an anchor post like the Gervais Principle or A Big Little Idea Called Legibility turn into the seed of a longer series and eventually work its way into the voice and subtext of a blog? At what point does it give birth to a book? At what point does it turn into a tumor that threatens the vitality of the blog? At what point does it threaten to create an echo-chamber of insider conversations?

I’ve talked about content quite a lot already this year, so let me say a little more about people and relationships in relation to blogging.

Going deep is about cultivating relationships so they transcend numbers. There are obviously natural limits here. I would say I know about a dozen of you quite well by now. Another couple of dozen, I know casually.

I don’t know what blogging will look like in 2050, but I do know that masses of nameless data points won’t really matter. The ones who are more than numbers will be the ones who make this both worth doing and possible to do, psychologically, socially and financially. My limit is probably around 150, but I’ll worry about that when I get there.

I sometimes have conversations with other bloggers where we discuss propositions like “10,000 RSS subscribers is really the critical threshold at which X happens.”

But in a way, I cannot bring myself to care about such numbers games. Perhaps such claims are true. I wouldn’t know. Philosophically I’d prefer to have more stories to tell than graphs to ponder. I don’t have the right psychological wiring to play the mass-market analytics-driven game. I wouldn’t care if my readership plateaued at 4500 RSS readers (or future equivalents), so long as the evolving story kept getting richer and more interesting, with more oddball characters, weird events and strange memories accumulating every year.

Going deep is of course not the only approach to the long 30-40 year game. I suppose many of my peers with equally long views are going for the broad game: building certain numbers across multiple generations of technology, and growing a nameless, faceless, storyless “market” at a clockwork 5% a year or something.  But something about that sheer quantitative scaling vision, with no change in the narrative of the Blogging Life, depresses me.

Going Deep in Practice

Back here in 2012, the Blogging Life evolves one year at a time, one tax-return at a time, as you ponder whether to keep at it for another year, or quit the game and look for a job. So far so good. 2012 is shaping up to be a good year for me, consulting-wise, so I don’t think I’ll be forced to quit this year. This also means I am relatively unconstrained in deciding how to use sponsorship money to improve the blog, since I’ve already got rent covered.

Last year, I spent about half the sponsorship money on a new laptop, and the rest on organizing several field trips for readers in the Bay Area. I met at least a hundred readers in person, and made at least a half-dozen new friends. Ridiculous numbers for an introvert. But then, the Web is changing our ideas about what words like introvert even mean.

This year my plans have changed. Thanks to the success of Refactor Camp in paying for itself without much subsidizing, I think offline events can safely be left to fund themselves if money is required.  My future plans on that front are to make all such events no-profit/no-loss, and paid for entirely by attendees.

That also makes it fairer, since I don’t want to use global sponsorship money only in the few physical locations where there are enough Friends of Ribbonfarm around to sustain ongoing real-world activities.

So my spending plans this year, depending on the sponsorship levels, will be split between supporting core writing projects  and “going deep” experiments.

On the first front, at some point this year, I hope to start my second serious book. I thought of doing a Kickstarter funding drive for it separately, but then I realized I prefer the looser sponsorship model for this sort of thing, with fluid expectations and commitments. After all, with Tempo, I moved my publication date something like six times and got it out the door two years later than I planned. But I got it done.

On the second front, I will be trying out a few online “going deep” experiments. I am not sure what those might be yet. I’ve thought of (or had suggested to me) various ideas like offering paid blogging apprenticeships, holding “online field trips” based on the offline ones from last year, supporting a sort of online coworking studio (free, but with qualifying requirements for members), and a webinar series.

We’ll see. I am open to suggestions.

So with that, I’ll leave you with the link to the 2012 sponsors page.

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Sometime in the last few years, apparently everybody turned into a hacker.  Besides  computer hacking, we now have lifehacking (using  tricks and short-cuts to improve everyday life), body-hacking (using sensor-driven experimentation to manipulate your body), college-hacking (students who figure out how to get a high GPA without putting in the work) and career-hacking (getting ahead in the workplace without “paying your dues”). The trend shows no sign of letting up. I suspect we’ll soon see the term applied in every conceivable domain of human activity.

I was initially very annoyed by what I saw as a content-free overloading of the term, but the more I examined the various uses, the more I realized that there really is a common pattern to everything that is being subsumed by the term hacking. I now believe that the term hacking is not over-extended; it is actually under-extended. It should be applied to a much bigger range of activities, and to human endeavors on much larger scales, all the way up to human civilization.

I’ve concluded that we’re reaching a technological complexity threshold where hacking is going to be the main mechanism for the further evolution of civilization. Hacking is part of a future that’s neither the exponentially improving AI future envisioned by Singularity types, nor the entropic collapse envisioned by the Collapsonomics types. It is part of a marginally stable future where the upward lift of diminishing-magnitude technological improvements and hacks just balances the downward pull of entropic gravity, resulting in an indefinite plateau, as the picture above illustrates.

I call this possible future hackstability.

Hacking as Anti-Refinement

Hacking is the term we reach for when trying to describe an intelligent, but rough-handed and expedient behavior aimed at manipulating a complicated reality locally for immediate gain. Two connotations of the word hack, rough-hewing and mediocrity, apply to some extent.

I’ll offer this rather dense definition that I think covers the phenomenology, and unpack it through the rest of the post.

Hacking is a pattern of local, opportunistic manipulation of a non-disposable complex system that causes a lowering of its conceptual integrity, creates systemic debt and moves intelligence from systems into human brains.

By this definition, hacking is anti-refinement. It is therefore a barbarian mode of production because it moves intelligence out of systems and into human brains, making those human brains less interchangeable. Yet, it is not the traditional barbarian mode of predatory destruction of a settled civilization from outside its periphery.

Technology has now colonized the planet, and there is no “outside” for anyone to emerge from or retreat to. Hackers are part of the system, dependent on it, and aware of its non-disposable nature. In evolutionary terms, hacking is a parasitic strategy: weaken the host just enough to feed off it, but not enough to kill it.

Breaching computer systems is of course the classic example. Another example is figuring out hacks to fall asleep faster. A third is coming up with a new traffic pattern to reroute traffic around a temporary construction site.

• In our first example, the hacker has discovered and thought through the implications of a particular feature of a computer system more thoroughly than the original designer, and synthesized a locally rewarding behavior pattern: an exploit.
• In our second example, the body-hacker has figured out a way to manipulate sleep neurochemistry in a corner of design space that was never explored by the creeping tendrils of evolution, because there was never any corresponding environmental selection pressure.
• In our third example, the urban planner is creating a temporary hack in service of long-term systemic improvement. The hacker has been co-opted and legitimized by a subsuming system that has enough self-awareness and foresight to see past the immediate dip in conceptual integrity.

Urban planning is a better prototypical example to think about when talking about hacking than software itself, since it is so visual.  Even programmers and UX designers themselves resort to urban planning metaphors to talk about complicated software ideas.  If you want to ponder examples for some of the abstractions I am talking about here, I suggest you think in terms of city-hacking rather than software hacking, even if you are a programmer.

For the overall vision of hackstability, think about any major  urban region with its never-ending construction and infrastructure projects ranging from emergency repairs to new mass-transit or water/sewage projects. If a large city is thriving and persisting, it is likely hackstable. Increasingly, the entire planet is hackstable.

The atomic prototype of hacking is the short-cut.  The urban planner has a better map and understands cartography better, but in one small neighborhood, some little kid knows a shorter, undocumented A-to-B path than the planner. Even though the planner laid out the streets in the first place. What’s more, the short-cut may connect points on the map that are otherwise disconnected for non-hackers, because the documented design has no connections between those points.

Disposability and Debt

I got to my definition of hacking after trying to assemble a lot of folk wisdom about programming into a single picture.

The most significant piece for me was Joel Spolsky’s article about things you should never do, and in particular his counter-argument to Frederick Brooks’ famous idea that you should plan to “throw one away” (the idea in software architecture that you should plan to throw away the first version of a piece of software and start again from scratch).

Spolsky offers practical reasons why this is a bad idea, but what I took away from the post was a broader idea: that it is increasingly a mistake to treat any technology as disposable. Technology is fundamentally not a do-over game today. It is a cumulative game. This has been especially true in the last century, as all technology infrastructure has gotten increasingly inter-connected and temporally layered into techno-geological strata of varying levels of antiquity. We should expect to see disciplines emerge with labels like techno-geography, techno-geology and techno-archaeology. Some layers are functional (“techno-geologically active”), while others are compressed garbage, like the sunken Gold Rush era ships on which parts of San Francisco are built.

Non-disposability along with global functional and temporal connectedness means technology is a single evolving entity with a memory. For such systems the notion of technical debt, due to Ward Cunningham, becomes important:

“Shipping first time code is like going into debt. A little debt speeds development so long as it is paid back promptly with a rewrite… The danger occurs when the debt is not repaid. Every minute spent on not-quite-right code counts as interest on that debt. Entire engineering organizations can be brought to a stand-still under the debt load of an unconsolidated implementation.”

For me, the central implicit idea in the definition is the notion of disposability. Everything hinges on whether or not you can throw your work away and move on. We are so used to dealing with disposable things in everyday consumer life that we don’t realize that much of our technological infrastructure is in fact non-disposable.

How ubiquitous is non-disposability? I am tempted to conclude that almost nothing of significance is disposable. And by that I mean disposable with insignificant negative consequences of course. Anything can be thrown away if you are willing to pay the costs.

Your body, New York City and the English language are obviously non-disposable. Reacting to problems with those things and trying to “do over” is either impossible or doomed. The first is impossible to even do badly today. You can try to “do over” New York City, but you’ll get something else that will probably not serve. If you try to do-over English, you get Esperanto.

Obviously, the bigger the system and the more interdependent it is with its technological environment, the harder it is to do it over. The dynamics of technical debt naturally leads us to non-disposability, but let’s make the connection explicit and talk about the value in the patchwork of hacks and workarounds in a complex system that, as Spolsky argues, represents value that should not be thrown away.

Quantified Technical Debt and Metis

If a system must last indefinitely, cutting corners in an initial design leads to a necessary commitment to “doing it right” later. This deferral is due to lack of both resources and information in an initial design. You lack the money/time and the information to do it right.

When a new contingency arises, some of the missing information becomes available. But resources do not generally become available at the same time, so the design must be adapted via cheaper improvisation to deal with the contingency — a hack — and the “real” solution deferred.  A hack turns an unquantified bit of technical debt into a quantified bit: when you have a hack, you know the principal, interest rate and so forth.

It is this quantified technical debt that is the interesting quantity. The designer’s original vague sense of incompleteness and inadequacy becomes sharply defined once a hack has exposed a failing, illuminated its costs, and suggested a more permanent solution. The new information revealed by the hack is, by definition, not properly codified and embedded in the system itself, so most of it must live in a human brain as tacit design intelligence (the rest lives in the hack itself, representing the value that Spolsky argues should not be throw away).

When you have a complex and heavily-used, but slowly-evolving technology, this tacit knowledge accumulating in the heads of hackers constitutes what James Scott calls metis. Distributed and contentious barbarian intelligence. It can only be passed on from human to human via apprenticeship, or inform a risky and radical redesign that codifies and embeds it into a new version of the system itself. The longer you wait, the more the debt compounds, increasing risk and the cost of the eventual redesign.

Technological Deficit Economics

This compounding rate is very high because the longer a system persists, the more tightly it integrates into everything around it, causing co-evolution. So eventually replacing even a small hack in a relatively isolated system with a better solution turns into a planet-wide exercise, as we learned during Y2K.

Isolated technologies also get increasingly situated over time, no matter how encapsulated they appear at conception, so that what looks like a “do-over” from the point of view of a single subsystem (say Linux) looks like a hack with respect to larger, subsuming systems (like the Internet). So debt accumulates at levels of the system that no individual agent is nominally responsible for. This is collective, public technical debt.

Most complex technologies incur quantified technical debt faster than they can pay it off, which makes them effectively non-disposable. This includes non-software systems. Sometimes the debt can be ignored because it ends up being an economic externality (pollution for automobiles, for instance), but the more all-encompassing the system gets, the less room there is for anything to be an unaccounted-for externality.

The regulatory environment can be viewed as a co-evolving part of technology and subject to the same rules. The US constitution and the tax code for instance, started off as high-conceptual-integrity constructs which have been endlessly hacked through case law and tax code exceptions to the point that they are now effectively non-disposable. It is impossible, as a practical matter, to even conceptualize a “Constitution 2.0″ to cleanly accommodate the accumulated wisdom in case law.

In general, following Spolsky’s logic through to its natural conclusion, it is only worth throwing a system away and building a new one from scratch when it is on the very brink of collapse under the weight of its hacks (and the hackers on the brink of retirement or death, threatening to take the accumulated metis with them). The larger the system, the costlier the redesign, and the more it makes sense to let more metis accumulate.

Beyond a certain critical scale, you can never throw a system away because there is no hope of ever finding the wealth to pay off the accumulated technical debt via a new design. The redesign itself experiences scope creep and spirals out of the realm of human capability.

All you can hope for is to keep hacking and extending its life in increasingly brittle ways, and hope to avoid a big random event that triggers collapse. This is technological deficit economics.

Now extend the argument to all of civilization as a single massive technology that can never be thrown away, and you can make sense of the idea of hackstability as an alternative to collapse. Maybe if you keep hacking away furiously enough, and grabbing improvements where possible, you can keep a system alive indefinitely, or at least steer it to a safe soft-landing instead of a crash-landing.

Hacker Folk Theorems

With disposability as the anchor element, we can try to arrange a lot of the other well-known pieces of hacker folk-wisdom into a more comprehensive jigsaw puzzle view.

The pieces of wisdom are actually precise enough that I think of them as folk theorems (item 5 actually suggests a way to model hackstability mathematically as a sort of hydrostatic — bug-o-static? — equilibrium)

1. “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” — Linus’ Law, formulated by Eric S. Raymond
2. Perspective is worth 80 IQ points. — Alan Kay
3. Fixing a bug is harder than writing the code. — not sure who first said this.
4. Reading code is harder than writing code. — Joel Spolsky
5. Fixing a bug introduces 2 more. — not sure where I first encountered this quote.
6. Release early, release often. — Eric S. Raymond
7. Plan to throw one away — Frederick Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month

Take a shot at using these ideas to put together a picture of how complex technological systems evolve, using the definition of hacking that I offered and the idea of technical debt as the anchor element (I started elaborating on this full picture, but it threatened to run to another 5000 words).

When you’re done, you may want to watch (or rewatch) Alan Kay’s talk, Programming and Scaling, which I’ve referenced before.

I don’t know of any systematic studies of the truth of these folk-wisdom phenomena (I think I saw one study of the bugs-eyeballs conjecture that concluded it was somewhat shaky, but I can’t find the reference). But I have anecdotal evidence from my own limited experience with engineering, and somewhat more extensive experience as a product manager, that all the statements have significant substance behind them.

So these are not casual, throwaway remarks. Each can sustain hours of thoughtful and stimulating debate between any two people who’ve worked in technology.

The Ubiquity of Hacking

At this point, it is useful to look for more examples that fit the definition of hacking I offered. The following seem to fit:

1. The pick-up artist movement should really be called female-brain hacking (or alternatively, alpha-status hacking)
2. Disruptive technologies represent market-hacking.
3. Lifestyle design can be viewed as standard-of-living hacking
4. One half of the modern smart city/neo-urbanist movement can be understood as city-hacking (“smart cities” includes clean-sheet high-modernist smart cities in China, but let’s leave those out)
5. All of politics is culture hacking
6. Guerrilla warfare and terrorism represent military hacking
7. Almost the entire modern finance industry is economics-hacking
8. Most intelligence on both sides of any adversarial human table (VCs vs. entrepreneurs, interviewers vs. interviewees) is hacker intelligence.
9. Fossil fuels represent energy hacking

Looking at these, it strikes me that not all examples are equally interesting. Anything that has the nature of a human-vs.-human arms race (including the canonical black-hat vs. white-hat information security race and PUA) is actually a pretty wimpy example of hackstability dynamics.

The really interesting cases are the ones where one side is a human intelligence, and the other side is a non-human system that simply gets more complex and less disposable over time.

But interesting or not, all these are really interconnected patterns of hacking in what is increasingly Planet Hacker.

The Third Future

So what is the hackstable future? What reason is there to believe that hacking can keep up with the downward pull of entropy? I am not entirely sure. The way big old cities seem to miraculously survive indefinitely on the brink of collapse gives me some confidence that hackstability is a meaningful concept.

Collapse is the easiest of the three scenarios to understand, since it requires no new concepts. If the rate of entropy accumulation exceeds the rate at which we can keep hacking, we may get sudden collapse.

The Singularity concept relies on a major unknown-unknown type hypothesis: self-improving AI. A system that feeds on entropy rather than being dragged down by it.  This is rather like Taleb’s notion of anti-fragility, so I am assuming there are at least a few credible ideas to be discovered here. These I have collectively labeled autopoietic lift.  Anti-gravity for complex systems that are subject to accumulating entropy, but are (thermodynamically) open enough that they might still evolve in complexity. So far, we’ve been experiencing two centuries of lift as the result of a major hack (fossil fuels). It remains to be seen whether we can get to sustainable lift.

Hackstability is the idea that we’ll get enough autopoietic lift through hacks and occasional advances in anti-fragile system design to just balance entropy gravity, but not enough to drive exponential self-improvement.

Viewed another way, it is a hydrostatic balance between global hacker metis (barbarian intelligence) and codified systemic intelligence (civilizational intelligence). In this view, hackstability is the slow dampening of the creative-destruction dialectic between barbarian and civilized modes of existence that has been going on for a few thousand years. If you weaken the metis enough, the system collapses. If you strengthen it too much, again it collapses (a case of the hackers shorting the system as predators rather than exploiting it parasitically).

I don’t yet know whether these are well-posed concepts.

I am beginning to see the murky outlines of a clean evolutionary model that encompasses all three futures though. One with enough predictive power to allow coarse computation of the relative probabilities of the three futures. This is the idea I’ve labeled the Electric Leviathan, and chased for several years. But it remains ever elusive.  Each time I think I’ve found the right way to model it, it turns out I’ve just missed my mark. Maybe the idea is my white whale and I’ll never manage a digital-age update to Hobbes.

So I might be seeing things. In a way, my own writing is a kind of idea-hacking: using local motifs to illuminate some sort of subtlety in a theme and invalidate some naive Grand Unified Theory without offering a better candidate myself. Maybe all I can hope for is to characterize the Electric Leviathan via a series of idea hacks without ever adequately explaining what I mean by the phrase.

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My Big History reading binge last year got me interested in the history of individualism as an idea.  I am not entirely sure why, but it seems to me that the right question to ask is the apparently whimsical one, “How do you run away from home?”

I don’t have good answers yet. So rather than waiting for answers to come to me in the shower, I decided to post my incomplete thoughts.

Let’s start with the concept of individualism.

The standard account of the idea appears to be an ahistorical one; an ism that modifies other isms like libertarianism, existentialism and anarchism.

Fukuyama argues, fairly persuasively, that the individual as a meaningful unit only emerged in the early second millennium AD in Europe, as a consequence of the rise of the Church and the resultant weakening of kinship-based social structures. This immediately suggests a follow-on question: is the slow, 600-700-year rise of individualism an expression of an innate drive, unleashed at some point in history, or is it an unnatural consequence of forces that weaken collectivism and make it increasingly difficult to sustain? Are we drifting apart or being torn apart?

Do we possess a fundamental “run away from home” drive, or are we torn away from home by larger, non-biological forces, despite a strong attachment drive?

Chronic Disease or Natural Drive?

If the former is true, individualism is a real personality trait that was merely expensive to express before around 1300 AD. The human condition prior to the rise of individualism could be viewed as a sort of widespread diseased state. Only the rare prince or brave runaway could experience an individualistic lifestyle.

If the latter is true, individualism is something like an occasional solitude-seeking impulse that has been turned into a persistent chronic condition by modern environments. That would make individualism the psychological equivalent of chronic physiological stress.

According to Robert Sapolsky’s excellent book Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, chronic stress is the diseased state that results when natural and healthy acute stress responses — the kind we use to run away from lions — get turned on and never turned off. This is more than an analogy. If individualism is a disease, it probably works by increasing chronic stress levels.

The interesting thing about this question is that the answer will seem like a no-brainer to you depending on your personality. To someone like me, there is no question at all that individualism is natural and healthy. To someone capable of forming very strong attachments, it seems equally obvious that individualism is a disease.

The data apparently supports the latter view, since happiness and longevity are correlated with relationships, as is physical health. Radical individualism is physically stressful and shortens lifespans. I bet if you looked at the data, you’d find that individualists do get ulcers more frequently than collectivists.

But to conclude from this data that individualism is a disease is to reduce the essence of being human to a sort of mindlessly sociable existence within a warm cocoon called home. If individualism is a disease, then the exploratory and restless human brain that seeks to wander alone for the hell of it is a sort of tumor.

Our brains, with their capacity for open-ended change, and restless seeking of change and novelty (including specifically social change and novelty), make the question non-trivial. We can potentially reprogram ourselves in ways that muddy the distinctions between natural and diseased behaviors.

The social perception of individualism through history has been decidedly mixed, and we have popular narratives around both possibilities thrown at us from early childhood  (think of two classic children’s books: The Runaway Bunny and Oh, the Places You Will Go).

Around the world (and particularly in the West), individualism has superficially positive connotations.  Correlations to things like creativity and originality are emphasized.

But the social-institutional structure of the world possesses a strong an immune defense against individualism everywhere. We don’t realize this because mature Western-style institutions allow for a greater variety of scripts to choose from.

This variety represents a false synthesis of individualism and collectivism. A domestication of individualist instincts. A better synthesis is likely to be psychological rather than sociological, since we are talking about intrinsic drives.

The Runaway Drive

The existence of an attachment drive is not a matter for debate. It clearly exists, and is just as clearly healthy and natural. Nobody has suggested (to my knowledge) that the ability to form attachments and relationships is a disease. There do exist fundamentally unsociable species (such as tigers and polar bears) for which adult sociability could be considered a disease, but homo sapiens is not among them.

The  attachment drive breaks down into two sub-drives, getting ahead and getting along (competition and cooperation) that both require being attached to the group.

The question is whether a third drive, getting away, exists. This is not the same as being an exile or outcast. Those are circumstantial and contingent situations: self- or other-imposed punishments. I am also not talking about “running away from home” as a response to toxic communities or abusive families. That is merely a case of lower-level survival drives in Maslow’s pyramid over-riding higher-level social drives.

The getting away drive is the drive to voluntarily leave a group because it is a natural thing to do. A drive that is powerful enough to permanently overpower getting ahead and getting along drives, resulting in a persistent state of solitary nomadism and transient sociability in the extreme case, like that of George Clooney in Up in the Air. In his case, it turns out to be empty bravado, a pretense covering up a yearning for home. But I believe real (and less angsty) versions exist.

If we do possess such a drive, it presumably shows up as a weaker or stronger trait, with some individuals remaining strongly attached and others itching to cut themselves loose. In my post, Seeing Like a Cat, I argued that:

I am a cat person, not in the sense of liking cats more (though I do), but actually being more catlike than doglike. Humans are more complex than either species; we are the products of the tension between our dog-like and cat-like instincts.  We do both sociability and individualism in more complicated ways than our two friends; call it hyper-dogginess plushyper-cattiness. That is why reductively mapping yourself exclusively to one or the other is such a useful exercise.

To argue for a getting away drive is to argue for the presence of a cat-like element to our nature (specifically, tiger-like unsociability, not lion-like; in the latter, individualism is exile imposed on young males. Domestic cats appear to be an in-between species).

Fukuyama does not get to the evolutionary psychology of individualism, and appears to be agnostic towards the question. He merely marshals evidence to show that the original human condition was a strongly collectivist one, from which at some point a widespread pattern of individualist behavior emerged. Since his focus is on the institutional history of civilization, he limits his treatment to the necessary level of institutional development and externalized trust required for individualism to exist.

Graeber appears to believe that it is a disease. For him, identity is social identity. The individual is defined in terms of a “nexus of  relationships.” To be torn away from this nexus is slavery and loss of identity. While the theory is a workable one if you are talking about actual slavery (he treats the history of the African slave trade at considerable length), things get murky when you get to other situations.

The Three R’s of Rootedness

Homesickness provides a good lens through which to understand attachment drives. Diasporas and expat communities provide a good illustration of the dynamics of both wanderlust and homesickness.

For some, the expat condition is torture. They return to some place that feels like “home” every chance they get. If they cannot, they recreate home wherever they are, as a frozen museum of memories. Home in this sense is doggie home. It is a social idea, not a physical idea. Physical elements of home serve as triggers for memories of social belonging.

There is a third kind response to the diaspora state, integration into the new environment, that is also an expression of homesickness.  It is merely a more adaptable variety that is capable of building a new home in unfamiliar surroundings (which can be either a new stationary geography or a moving stream). This takes effort. Many of my Indian friends who came to America at the same time as I did are now rabid football fans. They used to be rabid cricket fans back in India. It’s just a small part of their careful (and ongoing) effort to construct a new sense of home.

All these responses are a reaction to the pain of homesickness: return, recreation, rerooting. The three R’s of rootedness.

It is tempting to believe that some sense of home is necessary from a pragmatic point of view. After all, life would be hell for practical purposes if you were always in highly unfamiliar physical and social environments.  Perhaps you don’t need the pain of homesickness in order to want a home. Perhaps practical considerations are enough.

It’s more complicated than that.

Utilitarian and Psychological Homes

Utilitarian familiarity in the environment to support a low-friction, efficient life does not require a full-blown sense of home. Something much simpler will suffice. Practical needs are much easier to satisfy than existential ones.

For instance, Starbucks can supply a familiar work environment anywhere in the world, but it hardly seems meaningful to call Starbucks a part of a sense of home.

Highly developed civil societies can provide, with greater ubiquity, much of the utilitarian support structure that “home” supplies in less developed ones. Starbucks represents a mass-produced modular piece of an abstract sense of home that can be manufactured from interchangeable environmental pieces.

This is a useful thought, but you need to distinguish between utilitarian homes (defined primarily by “sufficiently familiar” material environments that don’t require new learning) and psychological homes (defined primarily by social environments and specific relationships) to make the model hang together.

I actually resist the notion of “my Starbucks” wherever I am, and if possible, I try to find multiple Starbucks locations that I then rotate through. I seem to naturally resist the tendency of utilitarian homes to turn into psychological homes. I like to keep my cafes interchangeable. I have never personalized a cubicle or office. I am not quite as extreme as George Clooney in Up in the Air  though, who prefers hotel rooms to his own apartment. I do personalize some parts of my home environment, but the need has been diminishing.

There is some evidence that people are starting to manufacture interchangeable ideas of psychological homes as well. For example, there is the trope of fashionable urban women looking for a gay, male friend when they move to a new city. The role becomes defined in terms of the interchangeable-parts individuals capable of filling it, and home is anywhere your set of roles can be easily filled.

Ensemble television shows are full of references to this idea of interchangeable people in roles. In South Park for instance, when Cartman ends up in jail, the other kids look for a new fat kid.  When Kenny is sent to a foster home, Cartman looks for a new “poorest kid in school.” On Seinfeld (I think I am allowed to make Seinfeld references till 2017), Elaine at one point drops the other three characters and finds three new friends who are very similar, but with a small change (they are nice and positive instead of mean and negative, an example of a simple change in Elaine’s design pattern for “home.”)

But it is not clear to me that interchangeable psychological homes are possible beyond a point.  Still, the social trends are suggestive.

But the result of these developments is that we are now living with a strange successor to the idea of home.

Homes as Design Patterns

The utilitarian home is digital rather than physical in its dynamics. Home becomes a design pattern in your head (RAM) that can be “saved to disk” anywhere in the world where the substrate of civil society is sufficiently evolved. This is not the same as living out of a suitcase. This is not minimalism. This is virtualization. My design pattern for example, includes bike paths, a gym nearby, at least 2-3 coffee shops (preferably Starbucks) within walking/biking distance, a Chinese restaurant, and an Indian grocery store. I could probably write down the full specification in a couple of pages. It is very easy to instantiate this pattern in any American city above a certain size.

A slightly more complex metaphor is that home is now a program that can be recompiled, with a few changes, in any new environment. The physical pieces of the pattern are simply those that must be physical, and are too expensive to rent or sell/rebuy as you move. You cart these physical elements around in a U-Haul. Only a few pieces are in there due to their emotional significance. Most could be virtualized if cost structures changed.

Such environments are not new. Roman military camps were expressly designed this way. What is new is the ubiquity and general accessibility of such environments, and the rise in the number of people who choose to live this way, with a digital sense of home.

Since individual ideas of home constitute such a large proportion of what we call civilization, this has big consequences. The planet is turning into a hardware platform for a fluid idea of civilization that exists as a collection of design patterns for “home.”

It is less clear what the psychological idea of home has turned into. For some people, psychological home has clearly moved online. I recall an op-ed somewhere several years ago, comparing cellphones to pacifiers. Appropriate, if they represent a connection to psychological ‘home.’ Putting your phone away is like suddenly being teleported away from home to a strange new place.

For others, the three R’s still dominate the idea of home. Online life is not satisfying for these people. I think this segment will shrink, just as the number of people who are attached to paper books is shrinking.

For a speculative third category, we have the sitcom-ish idea of interchangeable people in roles. I am not sure this category is real yet. I see some evidence for it in my own life, but it is not compelling.

But for a fourth category of people, the need for a psychological home itself is reduced. A utilitarian home is enough. The getting away drive has irreversibly altered psychology.

Running Away from Home

I am afraid I am going to have to abandon you to your own devices abruptly at this point. This is as far as I’ve gotten. Questions that I am still thinking about include:

• The relationship between individualism and introversion/extroversion
• Developing the idea of utilitarian homes as design patterns that can be compiled anywhere
• What does the Freudian idea of superego map to in this model?
• A more satisfactory account of the evolution of ‘psychological home.’

The interesting thing about thinking about “home” in this digital sense is that “running away from home” is no longer about physical movement between unique social-physical environments (though that can play a part). If your sense of home is a pattern that you can instantiate anywhere the environment supports it, you cannot actually run away from it. But you can throw it away and make up or borrow a new design pattern.

I’ll write more about that at some point.

This post was partly inspired by discussions with reader MFH.

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Several recent discussions on a variety of unrelated topics with different people have gotten me thinking about two different attitudes towards dialectical processes. They are generalized versions of the professional attitudes  required of lawyers and judges, so I’ll refer to them as lawyer mind and judge mind. 

In the specialized context of the law, the dialectical process is structurally constrained and the required attitudes are  codified and legally mandated to a certain extent.  Lawyers must act as though they were operating from a lawyer-mindset, even if internally they are operating with a judge-mind. And vice-versa. Outside of the law, the distinction acquires more philosophical overtones.

I want to start with the law, but get to a broader philosophical, psychological and political distinction that applies to all of us in all contexts.

The Two Minds in Law

The lawyer mind allows you  to make up the best possible defense or prosecution strategy with the available evidence. Within limits, even if the defense lawyer is convinced his client is guilty, s/he is duty-bound to make the best possible case and is not required to share evidence that incriminates the defendant or weakens the case.  I asked several questions about this sort of thing on Quora and got some very interesting answers from lawyers. If you are a lawyer or judge and have opinions on these basic questions, you may want to add them as answers to the questions rather than as comments here.

The legal system is designed so that lawyers are under an ethical and legal obligation to try and win, rather than get at the “truth” in any sense. So a defense lawyer with a flimsy case, who is convinced of his client’s guilt, but who wins anyway because the prosecution is incompetent, is doing his job. S/he should not pull his/her punches.

What’s more, there is a philosophy behind the attitude. It is not letter over spirit. It is letter in service of the spirit. If things are working well, the lawyer should not suffer agonies to see justice not being served in the specific case, but find solace in the fact of the dialectic being vital and evolving as it should.

The lawyer, by pulling out all stops for a legal win, regardless of the merits of the case, is philosophically trusting the search for “truth” to the dialectic itself, and where the dialectic fails in a particular instance, s/he (I expect) views it as necessary inefficiency in the interests of the longer-term evolution of the legal system. It’s the difference between “not in my job description” small-mindedness and “trusting the system” awareness of one’s own role and its limitations.

The judge’s nominal role is to act as a steward of the dialectic itself and make sure it is as fair as can be at any given time, without attempting to push its limits outside of certain codified mechanisms. The judge is charged with explicitly driving towards the “truth” in the particular case, and also improving the system’s potential — it’s dialectical vitality — so that it discovers the truth better in the future (hence the importance of writing judgments with an eye on the evolution of case law, which is supposed to be a run a few steps ahead of legislation as a vanguard, and discover new areas that require legislative attention).

When Does This Work?

Now, if you think about it, this scheme of things works well when the system is actually getting wiser and smarter over time. If the system is getting dumber and more subverted over time, it becomes harder and harder for either the lawyer or the judge to morally justify their participation in and perpetuation of the system (assuming they care about such things).

A challenge for a judge might be, for instance, an increasing influence of money in the system, with public defenders getting worse over time, and rich people being able to buy better and better lawyers over time. If this is happening, the whole dialectic is falling apart, and trust in the system erodes. Dialectical vitality drains away and the only way to operate within the system is to become good at gaming it without any thought to larger issues. This is the purely predatory vulture attitude. If a legal system is full of vulture-lawyers and vulture-judges, it is a carcass.

A moral challenge for a lawyer might be, for instance, deciding whether or not to use race to his/her advantage in the jury selection process, effectively using legal processes to get racial discrimination working in his client’s favor. Should the lawyer use such tactics, morally speaking? It depends on whether the dialectic is slowly evolving towards managing race more thoughtfully or whether it is making racial polarization and discrimination worse.

This constant presence of the process itself in peripheral vision means that both lawyers and judges must have attitudes towards both the specific case and about the legal system in general. So an activist judge, for instance, might be judge-minded with respect to the case, but lawyer-minded with respect to the dialectic (i.e., being visibly partisan in their philosophy about if and how the system should evolve, and either being energetic or conservative in setting new precedents). You could call such a person a judge-lawyer.

A lawyer who writes legal thrillers on the side, with a dispassionate, apolitical eye on process evolution, might be called a lawyer-judge. A lawyer with political ambitions might be a lawyer-lawyer. I can’t think of a good archetype label for judge-judge, but I can imagine the type: an apolitical judge who is fair in individual cases and doesn’t try too hard to set precedents, but does so when necessary.

The x-(x’)-X-(X’) Template

Because of the existence of an evolving dialectic framing things, you really you have four possible types of legal professionals: lawyer-lawyers, judge-judges, lawyer-judges and judge-lawyers, where the first attitude is the (legally mandated and formal-role based) attitude towards a specific case, and the second is the (unregulated) political attitude towards the dialectic.

When the system is getting better all the time, all four roles are justifiable. But when it is gradually worsening beyond the point of no return, none of them is.  When things head permanently south, a mismatch between held and demonstrated beliefs is a case of bad faith. Since all hope for reform is lost the only rational responses are to abandon the system or be corrupt within it.

To get at the varieties of bad faith possible in a collapsing dialectic, you need to distinguish between held and demonstrated beliefs at both case and dialectic levels to identify the specific pattern.

So you might have constructs like lawyer-(judge)-lawyer-(lawyer).  This allows you to slice and dice various moral positions in a very fine-grained way. For example, I think a legalist in the sense that the term has been used in history, is somebody who adopts a lawyer-like role in a specific case within a dialectic that’s decaying and losing vitality, while knowing full well that it is decaying. Legalists help perpetuate a dying dialectic. You could represent this as lawyer-(judge)-judge-(lawyer).  I’ll let you parse that.

This is getting too meta even for me, so I’ll leave it to people who are better at abstractions to make sense of the possibilities here. I’ll just leave it at the abstract template expression I’ve made up: x-(x’)-X-(X’).

The special case of the law illuminates a broader divide in any sort of dialectical process. Some are full of judge-mind types. Others are full of lawyer-mind types.

The net behavior of a dialectic depends not just on the type of people within it, but on its boundary conditions: at the highest level of appeal, do judge-minds rule or lawyer-minds?

Within the judiciary, even though there are more lawyer minds, the boundary conditions are at the Supreme Court, where judge minds rule. So the dialectic overall is judge-minded due to the nature of its highest appeal process.

In other dialectics, things are different because the boundary conditions are different.

Governance Dialectics

The watershed intellectual difference that separates conservative (more lawyer-like) and liberal discourses (more judge-like) around a particular contentious subject is framed by the boundary conditions of the governance dialectic itself.

Politics exists within the dialectic that in principle subsumes all others: the governance dialectic. “In principle” because if the governance dialectic loses vitality, the subsumed dialectics can devour their parents.

You could argue that in a democracy where the legislative branch has the ability, in principle, to amend the constitution arbitrarily, the overall governance dialectic is one where the lawyer mind is the ultimate source of authority, since the top body is a bunch of formally lawyer-mind types. There are no judge-mind types with any real power, especially in parliamentary democracies. Nominally judicial roles like the Speaker are mostly procedural rather than substantive.

The theory of an independent judiciary does not in practice give judge-mind people equal authority. The check-and-balance powers of the judiciary are based on seeking to make the law more internally consistent rather than improving its intentions or governing values. Of course, if the legislative arm is slow in keeping up with the landscape being carved out by case law, the judiciary gains more de facto power. That’s a subsumed dialectic devouring its parent.

So in a democracy, lawyer-minds are structurally advantaged, since the most powerful institution is set up for lawyer minds. Bipartisanship (judge minds operating in a legislature) takes a special effort to go beyond the structural default through an act of imagination.

Among the other institutions in a free-market democracy, theoretically the judiciary, executive and free press are nominally judge-minded at their boundaries, while the market is lawyer-minded (more on that in a bit). So there is structural lawyer-mind bias in the top-level institutions (the legislature and the market) and a structural judge-mind bias in the secondary institutions (the judiciary, the press and the executive branch).

Traditional Imperial China was the opposite. The legal system ultimately derived its authority from a judge-mind figure, the Emperor. The lawyers were second-class citizens.

Other Dialectics

The notion of “free press” is currently being radically transformed due to the fundamental tension between journalism and blogging.

Journalism, at least nominally, is driven by a judge-mind dialectic. Journalists nominally aspire to a fair-and-balanced (without the Fox News scare quotes) role in society.

Blogging is driven by a lawyer-mind dialectic. Bloggers trust that the “truth will out” in some larger sense, and feel under no moral obligation to present or even see all sides of an issue. If the opposed side has no credible people, well, tough luck. The truth will just take a little longer to out. This gradual transformation of dialectical boundary conditions has been particularly clear in the various run-ins between Michael Arrington and newspapers like the Washington Post. This too is a case of a subsumed dialectic devouring its parent, since the government basically has no idea what its role in the new media world should be.

Science is another important dialectic. I won’t attempt to analyze it though, since it exists in a feedback loop with the rest of the universe, and is too complicated to treat here. Religion used to be dialectical in nature, but isn’t any more. But science is unimportant socially because it is very fragile, and in a world that is socially messy, it is easily killed. It never rules primarily because it takes a certain minimum amount of talent to participate in the scientific dialectic, which makes it similar to a minority dialectic.

Religion used to be a real dialectic. Now it is mostly theater in service of political dialectics.

Capitalism is another dialectic with the capacity to devour governance, just like the judiciary. But it is lawyer-like, not judge-like. The idea of a “fiduciary duty” to maximize shareholder wealth in the US is a lawyer-like duty towards society. The trend towards “social” businesses (B-corporations in the US) is an attempt to invent companies with more judge-like duties towards society. For the former to work, the market has to be closer to truly competitive, and getting better all the time. The invisible hand must be guided by an invisible and emergent judicial mind.

In an environment where pure competition has been greatly subverted, it is hard to justify this “fiduciary duty.” The rise of B-corporation philosophy, indicates a failure in the governance dialectic, since emergent judge-mind attitudes that should exist at the legislative level are being devolved to the corporate level.

In the US, the legislature has abdicated the spirit, if not the letter, of its responsibilities. Fiduciary duty may be a terrible idea, but the better solution would be to shift to a different, but still lawyer-mind model. This is because the market has a far lower capacity to manifest an emergent judge-mind. Since it is the governance dialectic that controls the nature and future of money, the principal coordination mechanism for the market, the market is ultimately subservient in principle, just like the judiciary.

Since the top-level emergent judge-mind requires a culture of bipartisan legislative imagination to exist, a legislative branch that cannot define imaginative visions on occasion enables a takeover by the structurally advantaged lawyer minds that comprise it, which leads to polarization and a power vacuum, which in turn leads to the devouring by nominally subsumed dialectics.

This is not an accident. By its very nature, you cannot structurally advantage judge-minds at the ultimate boundary of a social system. If you do, you are essentially legitimizing a sort of divine authority. The top level has to be lawyer-minds arguing by default, with an occasional lawyer gaining enough trust across the board to temporarily play judge.

Societies fail when their governance processes fail to demonstrate enough imagination for sufficiently long periods. We are living through such a period in the US today, as well as in many other parts of the world. Governance processes across the world have lost their vitality and there is a lot of devouring by dialectics it is supposed to subsume.

In the past during periods of such failure, violent adjustments have occurred. War is after all, the social dialectic of last resort.  Both world wars and the US Civil War represented such adjustments. In each case, the governance dialectic was revitalized, but at enormous cost in the short term.

Empathy and Passion

When you approach all reality with an intrinsic lawyer mind, you fundamentally believe that no matter how powerful your perspective-shifting abilities, you cannot adopt all relevant points of view. Not even all human points of view. With a judge-mind by contrast, your starting assumption is that you will eventually be able to appreciate all points of view in play. It is a somewhat arrogantly visionary perspective in that sense, and requires exhibition of a sufficient imagination to justify itself.

With a lawyer-mind for instance, if you are white, you don’t presume to understand the black point of view. With a judge-mind, you assume you can. Your emotions can also be lawyer-like (polarized passion) or judge-like (dispassionate).

If you are aware of, and unconflicted about, your role in a given dialectic, you don’t try to either suppress or amplify your emotions. You try to be mindful about how they influence your intellectual processes and control that influence if you think it is counter-productive. Up to a point, passion improves a lawyer mind and lack of passion improves a judge mind. Too much passion, and a lawyer-mind becomes emotionally compromised. Too little passion and a judge mind becomes apathetic. Both pathologies lead to procedural mistakes.

Passion cannot be conjured up out of nothing, nor can it be created or destroyed independently of intellectual reactions. So if you need more or less passion for your role, you have to either change your role via a true intellectual shift, or borrow or lend passion. This requires empathy.

Depending on whether the passion is on your side or the opposite side, empathy can make you more lawyer-minded or more judge-minded. Empathy for a friend makes you more lawyer-like. Empathy for a rival makes you more judge-like. This is how dialectics get more or less polarized. A dialectic with vitality can swing across this range more easily. One that lacks vitality gets locked into a preferred state.

So there is a sort of law of conservation of passion in a given situation, with passions of different polarities canceling out via cross-divide empathy, or reinforcing via same-side empathy.

There is a certain irreversability and asymmetry though. Judge-minds being fundamentally dispassionate cannot absorb passion and become lawyer-like as easily as lawyer-minds can absorb opposed passions and become more judge-like. This means judge-minds are more stable than lawyer-minds. To lower polarization, all the minds in a dialectic must mix more and let passions slosh and cancel out somewhat via empathy. This means breaking down boundaries and creating more human-to-human contact. To preserve or increase polarization on the other hand, artificial barriers must be created and maintained. Or you need a situation where material dialectics, like war and natural calamities, happen to be highly active.

This is fundamentally why the labels conservative and progressive mean what they do in politics.  This is also why conservatives are typically better organized institutionally. They have walls to maintain to prevent contamination of their lawyer minds.

And finally, this is also why the governance dialectic is structurally set up to advantage lawyer-minds at the highest levels: they need the structure more. It is up to judge-minds to transcend existing structures and imagine more structure into existence.

Knowing Your Place

With a lawyer mind in improving times, you conclude that your job is merely to do your absolute best with the perspectives you can access directly or via empathy, and trust larger processes to head in sane directions.

The lawyer mind is therefore an open system view that is more robust to unknown-unknowns. It trusts things it does not actually comprehend. It is intellectually conservative in that it knowingly limits itself. The judge mind is a closed system view that is less robust to unknown unknowns. It is intellectual ambitious in that it presumes to adopt a see-all/know-all stance. It does not trust what it cannot comprehend and is limited by what it can imagine.

Paradoxically, what makes a judge-mind closed is its capacity for imagination, while a lawyer-mind is open by virtue of its lack of imagination.  The ability to adopt many conflicting perspectives dispassionately fuels imaginative synthesis, but this synthesis then imprisons the judge mind. The reverse paradox holds for lawyer minds.

These paradoxes suggest that each type of mind contains the seed of the other, yin-yang style. I’ll leave you to figure out how. The fundamental delusion of a frozen judge-mind is the belief that this yin-yang state can exist in one mind all the time. The fundamental delusion of a frozen lawyer-mind is the belief that it never can.

In the Myers-Briggs system, where J(udging) and P(erceiving) represent what I’ve been calling the lawyer and judge mindsets respectively. Ironic that the labels are somewhat reversed.

Psychologically, I am a P (a fairly strong INTP), but intellectually, over the years I’ve become increasingly lawyer-minded rather than judge-minded. Perhaps it is the effect of blogging.  Perhaps it is a growing sense of the limits of my own abilities.

In terms of more artistic archetypes, the fox and hedgehog reflect lawyer and judge minds.

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There is a fascinating set of ideas that has been swirling around in the global zeitgeist for the past decade, around the quote that will keep Donald Rumsfeld in the history books long after his political career is forgotten. I am referring, of course, to the famous unknown-unknowns quote from 2002. Here it is:

[T]here are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – there are things we do not know we don’t know.

Rumsfeld put his finger on a major itch that set off widespread scratching. This scratching, which is about the collective human condition in the face of fundamental uncertainties, shows no sign of slowing down a decade later. But the conversation has taken an interesting turn that I want to call out.

Out of all this scratching, four broad narratives have emerged that can be arranged on a 2×2 with analytic/synthetic on one axis and optimistic/pessimistic on the other.  Three are rehashes of older narratives. But the fourth — the Hydra narrative — is new. I have labeled it the Hydra narrative after Taleb’s metaphor in his explanation of anti-fragility: you cut one head off, two emerge in its place (his book on the subject is due out in October).

The general idea behind the Hydra narrative in a broad sense (not just what Taleb has said/will say in October) is that hydras eat all unknown unknowns (not just Taleb’s famous black swans) for lunch. I have heard at least three different versions of this proposition in the last year. The narrative inspires social system designs that feed on uncertainty rather than being destroyed by it. Geoffrey West’s ideas about superlinearity are the empirical part of an attempt to construct an existence proof showing that such systems are actually possible.

My own favorite starting point for thinking about these things, as some of you would have guessed, is James Scott’s idea of illegibility, which is poised diplomatically at the origin, equally amenable to being incorporated in any of the narratives. It is equally capable of informing either skepticism or faith in any of the narratives, and can be employed towards both analysis and synthesis.

I haven’t made up my mind about the question in the title of the post, but am on alert for new ideas relating to it, from Taleb and others.  So this is something of an early-warning post.

A Timeline of Significant Events

The Rumsfeld quote captures the widespread (but mistaken) sense that this decade has been unusually full of unexpected major disasters, and the sense  that systemic global reactions to those events have been inadequate.

Here’s the rough timeline of some major and/or representative events in this particular trend.

• 1999: James Scott publishes Seeing Like a State
• 2001: The 9/11 attacks
• 2002: Donald Rumsfeld enters the history books with unknown-unknown
• 2004: Indian ocean tsunami
• 2005: Hurricane Katrina
• 2007: Nicholas Nassim Taleb publishes The Black Swan
• 2010: Haiti earthquake
• 2010: BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill
• 2011: Fukushima nuclear disaster
• 2011: Geoffrey West of the Santa Fe institute starts talking about new research on superlinearity, and why cities are immortal while corporations and people die
• 2012: Global Guerrillas blogger John Robb starts a new site, Resilient Communities
• 2012 Nicholas Nassim Taleb book, Anti-fragility (due out in October)

It is important to note that the decade itself has not been exceptional. As Fareed Zakaria noted in The Post-American World, we simply hear about big, unexpected, global disasters much faster than we used to, and in much greater (and more gory) detail.

If you don’t believe me, simply take an honest inventory of any other decade in the last century (you could go further back if you know enough history). You’ll find big natural disasters and political cataclysms in every decade.

What has been exceptional about the 2002-2012 decade is not what happened, but our intellectual response to it. The responses go beyond the well-known ones in the timeline above.  There appear to be hundreds of people thinking seriously along such lines and taking on significant projects related to such interests.

In the last year alone, I’ve been introduced to two such people in my local virtual neighborhood: Jean Russell (who coined the word thrivability as an alternative to sustainability) and Ed Beakley, who has been studying preparedness for unconventional crises through his Project White Horse since Katrina.

You might say a major movement is afoot. Whether it will go anywhere is unclear.

An Exceptional Response to an Unexceptional Decade

Two things are responsible for our exceptional response as a global culture.

The first is simply the slow decline of America’s relative role in global affairs, and the corresponding rise of a chaotic political energy around the globe, at all spatial frequencies from neighborhood block to planet-wide. It feels like there’s nobody in charge. This feels both liberating and scary.

The second is related to Zakaria’s point about information dissemination. The speed and completeness of our knowledge of global affairs has done more than expand our circle of concern. The potential of the Internet to enable new forms of collective action has also convinced us that we can act on those concerns in improved ways.

Unusually visible chaos, plus an authority vacuum, plus a perceived sense of greater control equal a deep restlessness.

It is a popular restlessness, not  just elitist hand-wringing. The latter is a permanent feature of world history; it is hard to find a period when the intellectual elites have not been animated by a sense of both crisis and opportunity.  This is not true of popular restlessness (which is different from popular unrest).

The popular restlessness has also been amplified by the collapse of traditional publishing. Not only is nobody in charge anymore, there are no official-sounding voices even pretending to be in charge. ”Newspaper of record” sounds almost archaic today.

The restlessness represents a social energy that seeks to do big things and looks for both intellectual and political leadership. It is a social energy that swings wildly between a sense of limitless potential and deep despair, and is hungry for both meaningful perspectives and rallying cries.

In other words, the social energy sloshes violently across the four quadrants, fueling a demand for all four of the emergent narratives.

The Rehash Quadrants

I don’t have much to say about the three older quadrants.

The bottom left is basically fatalist, and the label is due to Bruce Sterling. He uses it to cover the top left quadrant as well (in his scheme such “hairshirt green” thinking is a subset of “acting dead” and therefore part of “Dark Euphoria”), but I think this is a little unfair, since the thinking generally includes the idea of regeneration after a Dark Age. So “Spore” thinking seems to me to be a more accurate label than “acting dead.”

The bottom right quadrant includes your usual suspects who offer revisionist counter-narratives to every Dark Euphoria narrative. Contemporary thinkers in this quadrant include Matt Ridley (The Rational Optimist) and Steven Pinker (The Better Angels of Our Nature) and the late Michael Crichton (State of Fear).

Their general rhetorical strategy is to focus on data showing that things are actually improving and that perceptions of impending doom are either mistaken or overblown. Zakaria and most pro-globalists also belong in this quadrant. Their revisionist attempts enjoy varying degrees of success.

The optimistic-synthetic quadrant is the one where the most fresh thinking has emerged.

The Hydra Quadrant

There are two elements to the Hydras-eat-Unknown-Unknowns-for-lunch narrative.

One is simply a massive amount of Gung-Ho sentiment around Internet-tool-enabled individual empowerment. This is a mob of Horatio Alger heroes busily connecting the dots between 3D printing and worldwide abundance and peace. It almost feels as though, given the right cue, they would break out in a collective, worldwide song-and-dance flash mob involving a billion people.

This (non-dark) euphoria element is not new. It accompanies every major wave of technology.

What is new is the idea that we might be on the brink of a successful theory of social engineering.

The great hope is that we might somehow be able to put together ideas about anti-fragility, immortal cities and resilience to solve the problems that defeated the similarly-inspired authoritarian high-modernist (a term due to Scott) social engineers of a century ago.

The old failure, in the Hydra narratives, is framed as both a moral failure (a case of hubris and hamartia), and a technical failure: (they didn’t understand “bottom-up, organic, open-systems, network thinking.”)

It is important to note that no believer in the resurrected social engineering narrative has any clue what ”bottom-up, organic, open-systems network thinking” actually means. In fact they typically understand what they mean far less clearly than Le Corbusier understood authoritarian high modernism.

What lends them confidence in their narrative is, firstly, a sense that their efforts are now informed by an appropriate humility and a penitent understanding of past failures, and secondly, the (unfalsifiable) idea that “bottom-up and organic” cannot (or even should not) be comprehensible to any individual. There is a sense that an understanding of the idea can only exist at some, higher, collective level. Gaia knows, and we shall not want.

The moral dimension of the confidence can basically be ignored. It is merely secularized religiosity and a yearning for a moral calculus to confirm an analysis-by-faith.  There are of course psychological consequences of hubris that can be analyzed and understood, but there is nothing special about hubris as a source of failure modes. Humility and penitence generate their own failure modes.

The should not part is the culturally interesting reaction. True believers take offense at the very idea of studying the apparently ineffably-collective.

On occasion, when I’ve had this sort of discussion with the religiously Hydra-minded, and sketched out some sort of tentative model, they’ve looked at me aghast, as if I were King Nimrod attempting to build the Tower of Babel.

Building with Illegibility

I suppose I resonate with the idea of illegibility so much because it is so neutral with respect to the four narratives, and because it provides a useful amoral framework of analysis, within which things like hubris, over-reach and humility are merely minor psychological variables rather than central concerns (though Scott’s own leanings are clear, he keeps them clearly separated).

• In the bottom left quadrant, you can use the idea to understand why some grand social engineering projects fail.
• In the bottom right, you can use it to understand why other projects succeed.
• In the top left, it suggests design principles for resilient survival.
• And in the top right, the interesting new quadrant, it suggests the right questions that need to be asked in order to test, and if possible, realize, Hydra narratives.

It is this last project that interests me. Some questions that occur to me include:

• Can illegibility be understood as a reservoir of spare hydra heads in some information-theoretic sense?
• Is perfect illegibility equivalent to a renewable flow of maximally compressed information potential to fuel behavior?
• What dynamic mix of epistemic knowledge and metis knowledge best informs the growth and stewardship of Hydras?
• What is the ideal amount of illegibility in a given social system?
• What are the failure modes associated with too little legibility? (Scott documents the failure modes of too much legibility well, but mostly ignores the other end of the spectrum).

But to ask such questions, you must first give up the near-religious reverence for ineffable “bottom-up, network” models and the idea that attempting to understand them clearly within a single head rather than a swarm-head is a sinful act. It is merely a tricky one.

I am really looking forward to hearing what Taleb has to say in his book. I suspect, even if I disagree with all of it, it will fuel some fertile thinking for me. Evil twins tend to be reliably stimulating.

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I’ve been procrastinating on this post for a couple of weeks, wondering what the heck to say about my first attempt at a serious Ribbonfarm event: Refactor Camp 2012, on March 3rd, at the San Francisco Zoo.

Throughout 2011, I did a whole lot of physical-world stuff, meeting people all over the country, sleeping on couches and in spare bedrooms, and organizing a handful of field trips (I think I met at least a hundred people, if not more). But Refactor Camp felt different somehow.

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For the past several months, I’ve been immersed in nineteenth century history. Specifically, the history of interchangeability in technology between 1765, when the Système Gribeauval, the first modern technology doctrine based on the potential of interchangeable parts, was articulated, and 1919, when Frederick Taylor wrote The Principles of Scientific Management.

Here is the story represented as a Double Freytag diagram, which should be particularly useful for those of you who have read Tempo. For those of you who haven’t, think of the 1825 Hall Carbine peak as the “Aha!” moment when interchangeability was first figured out, and the 1919 peak as the conclusion of the technology part of the story, with the focus shifting to management innovation, thanks in part to Taylor.

The unsung and rather tragic hero of the story of interchangeability was John Harris Hall (1781 – 1841), inventor of the Hall carbine.  So I am naming my analog to Moore’s Law for the 19th century Hall’s Law in his honor.

The story of Hall’s Law is in a sense a prequel to the unfinished story of Moore’s Law. The two stories are almost eerily similar, even to believers in the “history repeats itself” maxim.

Why does the story matter? For me, it is enough that it is a fantastically interesting story. But if you must have a mercenary reason for reading this post, here it is: understanding it is your best guide to the Moore’s Law endgame.

So here is my telling of this tale. Settle in, it’s going to be another long one.

Onion Steel

In A Brief History of the Corporation, I argued that there were two distinct phases — an early mercantile-industrial phase that was primarily European in character, extending from about 1600 to 1800, and a later Schumpeterian-industrial phase, extending from about 1800-2000, that was primarily American and Russian in character.

Each phase was enabled by a distinct technological culture. In the early, British phase, a scientific sensibility was the exception rather than the rule. The default was the craftsman sensibility. In the later,  American-Russian phase, the scientific sensibility was the rule and the craftsman sensibility the exception (it is notable that the American-Russian phase was inspired by French thought rather than British; call it Napoleon’s revenge).

What was this (much romanticized today) craftsman sensibility?

Consider this passage about the state of steel-making in Sheffield, the leading early  nineteenth century technology center for the industry, before the rise of American steel. The quote is from Charles Morris’ excellent book The Tycoons, my primary reference for this post (it is nominally about the lives of Rockefeller, Carnegie, J. P. Morgan and Jay Gould, but is actually a much richer story about the broad sweep of 19th century technology history; I am not done with it yet, but it has been such a stimulating read that I had to stop and write this post):

Making a modest batch of steel could take a week or more, and traditional techniques were carefully passed down from father to son; one Sheffield recipe started by adding “the juice of four white onions.”

Morris attributes the onion story to Thomas Misa’s Nation of Steel, which is now on my reading list.

American steel displaced British steel not because it was based on the Bessemer and open hearth processes (Bessemer was English), but because the industry was built from the ground up along scientific lines, with no craftsman-baggage slowing it down.

The interesting thing about this recipe for onion steel is that it illustrates both the strengths and the weaknesses of the craftsman sensibility. You can only imagine the tedious sort of uninformed experimentation it took to consider adding onions to a steel recipe. There is something beautiful about the absence of preconceived notions in this sensibility. No modern metallurgist would even think to add onions to a metal recipe.

On the other hand, if a modern metallurgist were faced with data showing that onions improved the properties of steel, he or she would not rest until they’d either disproved the effect, or explained it in less bizarre terms. The recipe would certainly not get passed down from “father to son” (“mentor to mentee” today) unexplained.

What America brought to manufacturing was a wholesale shift from craftsman-and-merchant thinking about technology and business to engineer-and-manager thinking. The shift affected every important 19th century business sector: armaments, railroads, oil, steel, textile equipment. And it created a whole new sector: the consumer market.

But this was not the result of an abstract, ideological quest for scientific engineering and manufacturing, or a deliberate effort to replace high-skill/high-wage craftsmen with low-skill/low-wage/interchangeable machine operators.

It was a consequence of a relentless pursuit of interchangeability of parts, which in turn was a consequence of a pursuit of greater scale, profits and competition for market share (which drove greater complexity in offerings) on the vast geographic canvas that was America. Craft was merely a casualty along the way.

So why was interchangeability of parts a holy grail in this pursuit?

Interchangeability, Complexity and Scaling

The problem is that even the highest-quality craft does not scale. When something like a rifle is mass-produced using interchangeable parts, breakdowns can be fixed using parts cannibalized from other broken-down rifles (so two broken rifles can be mashed-up to make at least one that works) or with spare parts shipped from an warehouse. Manufacturing can be centralized or distributed in optimal ways, and constantly improved. Production schedules can be decoupled from demand schedules.

A craftsman-made rifle on the other hand, requires a custom-made/fitted replacement part. The problem is especially severe for an object like a rifle: small, widely-dispersed geographically, and liable to break down in the unfriendliest of conditions. Conditions where minimizing repair time is of the essence, and skilled craftsmen are rather thin on the ground. It is no surprise that the problem was first solved for guns.

Let’s do some pidgin math to get a sense of what a true mathematical model might look like.

Roughly speaking, scaling production for any mechanical widget involves three key dimensions: production volume V, structural complexity S (the number of  interconnections in an assembly is a good proxy measure for S, just like the number of transistors on a chip is a good proxy for its complexity) and operating tempo of the machine in use, T (since the speed of operation of a machine determines the stress and wear patterns, which in turn determines breakdown frequency; clock-rate is a similar measure for Moore’s Law).

For complex widgets, scaling production isn’t just (or even primarily) about making more new widgets; it is about keeping the widgets in existence in the field functioning for their design lifetime through post-sales repair and maintenance.  The greater the complexity and cost, the more the game shifts to post-sales.

You can combine the three variables to get a rough sense of manufacturing complexity and how it relates to scaling limits. Something like C=SxT provides a measure of the complexity of the artifact itself. Breakdown rate B is some function of complexity and production volumes, B=f(C, V). At some point, as you increase V, you get a corresponding increase in B that overwhelms your manufacturing capability. To complete this pidgin math model, you can think in terms of some B_max=f(C, V_max) above which V cannot increase without interchangeability.

Modern engineers use much more sophisticated measures (this crude model does not capture the tradeoff between part complexity and interconnection complexity for example, or the fact that different parts of a machine may experience different stress/wear patterns), but for our purposes, this is enough.

To scale production volume above V_max without introducing interchangeability, you have to either lower complexity and/or tempo or increase the number of skilled craftsmen. The first two are not options when you are trying to out-do the competition in an expanding market. That would be unilateral disarmament in a land-grab race. The last method is simply not feasible, since education in a craft-driven industrial landscape means long, slow and inefficient (in the sense that it teaches things like onion recipes) 1:1 apprenticeship relationships.

There is one additional method that does not involve interchangeability: moving towards disposability for the whole artifact, which finesses the parts-replacement problem entirely. But in practice, things get cheap enough for disposability to be a workable strategy only after mass production is achieved. Disposability is rarely a cost-effective strategy for craft-driven manufacturing, though I can think of a few examples.

These facts of life severely limited the scale of early nineteenth century technology. The more machines there are in existence, the greater the proportion of craftsmen whose time must be devoted to repair and maintenance rather than new production.  Since breakdowns are unpredictable and parts unique, there is no way to stockpile an inventory of spare parts cheaply. There is little room for cannibalization of parts in the field to temporarily mitigate parts shortages.

What was needed in the 19th century was a decoupling of scaling problems from manufacturing limitations.

Interchangeability and the Rise of Supply Chains

Interchangeability of parts breaks the coupling between scaling and manufacturing capacity by substituting supply-chain limits for manufacturing limits. For a rifle, you can build up a stockpile of spare parts in peace time, and deliver an uninterrupted supply of parts to match the breakdown rate. There is no need to predict which part might break down in order to meaningfully anticipate and prepare. You can also distribute production optimally (close to raw material sources or low-cost talent for instance), since there is no need to locate craftsmen near the point-of-use.

So when interchangeability was finally achieved and had diffused through the economy as standard practice (a process that took about 65 years), demand-management complexity moved to the supply chain, and most problems could be solved by distributing inventories appropriately.

These happy conditions lasted for nearly a century after widespread interchangeability was achieved, from about 1880 to 1980, when supply chains met their own nemesis, demand variability (that problem was partially solved using lean supply chains, which relied in turn on the idea of interchangeability applied to transportation logistics: container shipping. But I won’t get into that story here, since it is conceptually part of the unfinished Moore’s Law story).

The price that had to be paid for this solution was that the American economy had to lose the craftsmen and work with engineers, technicians and unskilled workers instead. This creates a very different technology culture, with different strengths and weaknesses. For example the scope of innovation is narrowed by such codification and scientific systematization of crafts (prima facie nutty ideas like onion steel are less likely to be tried), but within the narrower scope, specific patterns of innovation are greatly amplified (serendipitous discoveries like penicillin or x-rays are immediately leveraged to the hilt).

Why must craft be given up? Even the best craftsmen cannot produce interchangeable parts. In fact, the craft is practically defined by skill at dealing with unique parts through carefully fitted assemblies.  (“Interchangeability” is of course a loose notion that can range from functional replaceability to indistinguishability, but craft cannot achieve even the coarsest kind of interchangeability at any meaningful sort of scale).

Put another way, craft is about relative precision between unlike parts. Engineering based on interchangeability is about objective precision between like parts. One requires human judgment. The other requires refined metrology.

From Armory Practice to the American System

It was the sheer scale of America, the abundance of its natural resources (and the scarcity of its human resources), that provided the impetus for automation and the interchangeable parts approach to engineering.

As agriculture moved westward through New York, Pennsylvania and Michigan, the older settled regions began to turn to manufacturing for economic sustenance. The process began with the textile industry, born of stolen British designs around what is now Lowell, Massachusetts. But American engineering in the Connecticut river valley soon took on a distinct character.

Like the OSD/DARPA/NASA driven technology boom after World War II, the revolution was driven by the (at the time,  fledgling) American military, which had begun to acquire a mature and professional character after the war of 1812 (especially during the John Quincy Adams administration).

The epicenter of the action was the Springfield Armory, the PARC of its day, and outposts of the technology scene extended as far south as Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia.

John Hall was among the hundreds of pioneers who swarmed all over the Connecticut valley region, dreaming up mechanical innovations and chasing local venture capitalists, much like software engineers in Silicon Valley today.

There were plenty of other extraordinary people, including other mechanical engineering geniuses like Thomas Blanchard, inventor of the Blanchard gun-stock lathe (which was actually a general solution for turning any kind of irregular shape using what is known today as a pattern lathe). By the time he was done with gun stocks, a bottleneck part in gun-making, with all sorts of “subtle curves along multiple axes” he had created a system of 16 separate machines at the Springfield Armory that pretty much automated the whole process, squeezing out all craft of what had been the single most demanding component in gun-making.

British gun-making was like British steel-making before people like Blanchard and Hall blew up the scene. Here is Morris again:

The workings of the British gun industry were reasonably typical of the mid-nineteenth-century manufacturing. It was craft-based and included at least forty trades, each with its own apprenticeship system and organizations. The gun-lock, the key firing mechanism, was the most complicated, while the most skilled men were the lock-filers…[who]… spent years as apprentices learning to painstakingly hand-file the forty or so separate lock pieces to create a unified assembly… When the Americans breezily described machine-made stocks, and locks that required no hand fitting, they sounded as if there were smoking opium.

Among the opium-smoking geniuses, Blanchard at least enjoyed a good deal of success. Hall did not.

He put together almost the entire “American System” through his single-minded drive, in the technology-hostile Harper’s Ferry location far from the Connecticut Valley hub. When he was done, he had created an integrated manufacturing system of dozens of machines that produced interchangeable parts for every component of his carbine. Even parts from production runs from different years could be interchanged, a standard some manufacturing operations struggle to reach even today.

The achievement was based on relentless automation to eliminate human sources of error, increasingly specialized machines, and rigorous and precise measurements (there were three of every measurement instrument, one for production use, one for calibration, and a master instrument to measure wear on the other two).

It was a massive systems-engineering accomplishment. The Hall carbine was the starter pistol for the American industrial revolution.

Overtake, Pause, Overdrive

Hall did not reap much of the rewards. Thanks to unfortunate exploitative relationships (in particular with a shameless patent troll, William Thornton, a complete jerk by Morris’ account), he was banished to Harper’s Ferry rather than being allowed to work in Springfield. And his work, when completed, was acknowledged grudgingly, and with poor grace. The Hall carbine itself was obsolete by the time his system was mature, and others who applied it to newer products reaped the benefits.

Between 1825 and the 1910s, the methods pioneered by Hall spread through the region and beyond, and were refined and generalized. In the process, first America, and then the world, experienced a Moore’s Law type shock: rapidly increasing standards of living provided by an increasing variety of goods whose costs kept dropping.

Culturally, the period can be divided into three partially overlapping phases: an overtake phase (1851 – 1876)  when America clearly pulled ahead of Britain as the first nation in the technology world, a “pause” represented by the recession of the 1870s, and finally an over-drive phase beginning in the 1880s and continuing to the beginning of World War I, when the American model became the global model (and in particular, the Russian model, as Taylorism morphed into state doctrine).

Overtake: 1851 — 1876

The overtake phase has a pair of useful bookend events marking it. It began with the 1851 Crystal Palace Exhibition, the first of the great 19th century world fairs, when the world began to suspect that America was up to something (McCormick’s harvester and Colt’s revolver were among the items on display), and ended with the 1876 Centennial World Fair in Philadelphia, when all remaining doubt was erased and it became obvious that America had now comprehensively overtaken Britain in technology.

When Britain finally caught on and hastily began copying American practices following the Philadelphia fair, the result was a revitalization of British industry that produced, among other things, the legendary Enfield rifle (the rifle subplot in the story of interchangeability has an interesting coda that is shaping the world to this day, the Russian AK-47, as pure an example of the power of interchangeability-based mass manufacturing as has ever existed).

It wasn’t just guns. In every industry America began to show up Britain. Much of the credit went to showboating hustlers who claimed credit for interchangeability and the American System/Armory Practice, and made a lot of money without actually contributing very much to core technological developments. These included Eli Whitney of cotton gin fame, the McCormicks of the harvester, Samuel Colt (revolvers) and Isaac Singer (sewing machines). While they certainly contributed to the development of individual products, the invention of the American model itself was due to technologists like Blanchard and John Hall.

In the initial decades of the overtake, fueled in part by opportunity (and profiteering) associated with the Civil War and government subsidized building out of the railroad system, much of the impact was invisible. But by the 1890s, as the infrastructure phase was completed, the same methods were unleashed on everyday life, creating modern consumer culture and the middle class within the short space of a single generation.

The Pause: the 1870s

The Civil War looms large as the major political-economic event in this history (1861 – 1865), but the bulk of the impact was felt in the decade that followed, once the dust had settled and interrupted infrastructure projects were completed.

This impact took the form of the rather strange long recession of the 1870s, which was very culturally very similar to the one we are currently experiencing (increased economic uncertainty and fall in nominal incomes, hidden technology-driven increases in standard of living, foundational shifts in the nature of money — back then it was a greenbacks vs. gold thing).

One way to understand this process is that the infrastructure phase had created both tycoons and an extremely over-leveraged economy. It was the uncertain gap between “build it” and “they will come.”  It was a huge, collective pause, a national decade of breath-holding as people wondered whether the chaos unleashed by the new infrastructure would create a better social order or destroy everything without creating something new in its place.

Starting in the 1880s, the bet began paying off in spades. The recession ended and the over-drive boom began, as people figured out what to do with the newfound capabilities in their environment.

Overdrive: 1880s — 1913

A good early marker here is probably the first Montgomery Ward catalog in 1872, the first major sign that the new infrastructure allowed old businesses to be rethought, leading to the creation of the modern consumer economy.

The mail-order catalog was by itself a simple idea (the first catalog was just a single page), but the reason it disrupted old-school merchants was that it relied on all the infrastructure complexity that now existed.

Trains that ran on reliable schedules, to deliver mail, telegraph lines that brought instant price updates on western grain to the East Coast, steel to build everything, oil and electricity to light up (and later, fuel) everything, new financial systems to move money around, and of course, the application of interchangeability technology to everything in sight.

It took Sears, starting in 1888, to scale the idea and truly take down the merchant elites who had defined the old business culture, but by World War I, middle-class consumer culture had emerged and had come to define America. In another 50 years, it would come to define the world.

It was such a powerful boom that globally, it lasted a century, with two world wars and a Great Depression failing to arrest its momentum (as an aside, I wonder why people pay so much attention to the 1930s depression to make sense of the current recession; the 1870s recession makes for a far more appropriate comparison).

What ultimately killed it was its own success. Semiconductor manufacturing probably represents the crowning achievement of the Armory Practice/American System that began with a lonely John Hall pushing ahead against all odds at Harper’s Ferry.

Moore’s Law was born as the last and greatest achievement of the parent it ultimately devoured: Hall’s Law.

Hall’s Law

When you step back and ponder the developments between 1825 and 1919, it can be hard to make sense of all the action.

There is the pioneering work in manufacturing technology. There is the explosion of different product types as the American System diffused through the industrial landscape. There is the story of the rise of the first tycoons. There is the rise of consumerism and the gradual emergence of the middle class. There is the connectivity by steam and telegraph.

Then there is the increasingly confident and strident American presence on the global scene (especially through the World Fairs, two of which I already talked about). And of course, you have the Civil War, the California Gold Rush, the cowboy culture that existed briefly (and permanently reshaped the American identity) before Jay Gould killed it by finishing the railroad system.

There was the rise of factory farming and the meatpacking and refrigerator-car industries together killing the urban butcher trade and suddenly turning Americans into the greatest meat eaters in history. Paycheck economics took over as the tycoon economy killed the free agent.

In fact, there was a lot going on, to put it mildly. And that was just America. The rest of the world wasn’t exactly enjoying peace and stability either. Perry had kicked down the doors of Japan, Opium wars had ravaged China, the East India Company (the star of my History of Corporations post) had been quietly put out to pasture and the Mughal empire had collapsed. The Ottomans were    starting on a terminal decline. Continental Europe had begun its century-long post-Napoleon march towards World War I (the US Civil War served as a beta test for the post-Bismarck model of total war, just as the Spanish Civil war served as a beta test for World War II).

But just as Moore’s Law provides something of a satisfying explanatory framework for almost everything that has happened in the last 50 years, the drive towards the holy grail of interchangeability provides a satisfying explanatory framework for much of this action. Here’s my attempt at capturing what happened (someone enlighten me if something like this has already been proposed under a different name) :

Hall’s Law: the maximum complexity of artifacts that can be manufactured at scales limited only by resource availability doubles every 10 years. 

I believe this law held between 1825 and 1960, at which point the law hit its natural limits.

Here, I mean complexity in the loose sense I defined before: some function of mechanical complexity and operating tempo of the machine, analogous to the transistor count and clock-rate of chips.

I don’t have empirical data to accurately estimate the doubling period, but 10 years is my initial guess, based on the anecdotal descriptions from Morris’ book and the descriptions of the increasing presence of technology in the world fairs.

Along the complexity dimension, mass-produced goods increased rapidly got more complex, from guns with a few dozen parts to late-model steam engines with thousands.  The progress on the consumer front was no less impressive, with the Montogmery Ward catalog  offering mass-produced pianos within a few years of its introduction for instance. By the turn of the century, you could buy entire houses in mail-order kit form. The cost of everything was collapsing.

Along the tempo dimension, everything got relentlessly faster as well. Somewhere along the way, things got so fast thanks to trains and the telegraph, that time zones had to be invented and people had to start paying attention the second hand on clocks.

There is a ton of historical research on all aspects of this boom, but I suspect nobody has yet compiled the data in a form that can be used to fit a complexity-limit growth model and figure out the parameters of my proposed Hall’s Law, since it is the sort of engineering-plus-history analysis that probably has no hope of getting any sort of research funding (it would take some serious archaeology to discover the part-count, operating speed and production volumes for a sufficient number of sample products through the period to fit even my simple model, let alone a model that includes things like breakdown rates and actual, as opposed to theoretical, interchangeability).

But even without the necessary empirical grounding, I am fairly sure the model would turn out to be an exponential, just like Moore’s Law. Nothing else could have achieved that kind of transformation in that short a period, or created the kind of staggering inequality that emerged by the Gilded Age.

Break Boundaries and Tycoon Games

Both Moore’s Law and Hall’s Law in the speculative form that I have proposed, are exponential trajectories. These trajectories generally emerge when some sort of runaway positive-feedback process is unleashed, through the breaking of some boundary constraint (the term break boundary is due to Marshall McLuhan).

The positive-feedback part is critical (if you know some math, you can guess why: a “doubling” law in a difference/differential equation form has to be at least a first-order process; something like compound interest, if you don’t know what the math terms mean).

Loosely speaking, this implies a technological process that can be applied to itself, improving it. Better machines with interchangeable parts also means better machine tools that are themselves made with interchangeable parts and therefore can run continuously at higher speeds, with low downtime. Computers can be used to design more complex computers.  This is not true of all technological processes. Better plastics do not improve your ability to make new plastics, for instance, since they do not play much of a role in their own manufacturing processes.

This is the inner, technological positive-feedback loop (think of an entire technology sector engaging in a sort of 10,000 hours of deliberate practice; a major sign is that the most talented people turn to tool-building: Blanchard and Hall for Hall’s Law, people like the late Dennis Ritchie and Linus Torvalds for Moore’s Law).

But the technological positive-feedback loop requires an outer financial positive-feedback loop around it to fuel it. You need conditions where the second million is easier to make than the first million.

This means tycoons who spot some vast new opportunity and play land-grabbing games on a massive scale.

Both Hall’s Law and Moore’s Law led to wholesale management and financial innovation by precisely such new tycoons.

For Hall’s Law, the process started with Cornelius Vanderbilt, the hero of A. J. Stiles’ excellent The First Tycoon, who figured out how to tame the strange new beast, the post-East-India-Company corporation and in the process sidelined old money.

It is revealing that Vanderbilt was blooded in business through a major legal battle for steamboat water rights: Gibbons vs. Ogden (1824) that helped define the relationship of corporations to the rest of society. From there, he went from strength to strength, inventing new business and financial thinking along the way. Only in his old age did he finally meet his match: Jay Gould, who would go on to become the archetypal Robber Baron, taking over most of Vanderbilt’s empire from his not-so-talented children.

Vanderbilt was something of a transition figure. He straddled both management and finance, and old and new economies: he was a cross between an old-economy merchant-pirate in the Robert Clive mold (he ran a small war in Nicaragua for instance) and a new-economy corporate tycoon.  He transcended the categories that he helped solidify, which helped define the next generation of tycoons.

Among the four tycoons in Morris’ book, Rockefeller (Chernow’s Titan on Rockefeller is another must-read) and Carnegie appear on one side, as the archetypes of modern managers and CEOs. Both were masters of Wall Street as well, but were primarily businessmen.

On the financial side, we find the Joker-Batman pair of Gould and Morgan. Jay Gould was the loophole-finder-and-destabilizer; J. P. Morgan was the loophole-closer and stabilizer.  While Gould was a competent, if unscrupulous manager during the brief periods that he actually managed the companies he wrangled, he was primarily a financial pirate par excellence.

It makes for a very good story that he made his name by giving the elderly Vanderbilt, who pretty much invented the playbook along with his friends and rivals, the only financial bloody nose of his life (though Vanderbilt exacted quite a revenge before he died).   Through the rest of his career, he exposed and exploited every single flaw in the fledgling American corporate model, turning crude Vanderbilt-era financial tactics into a high art form. When he was done, he had generated all the data necessary for J. P. Morgan to redesign the financial system in a much stronger form.

Morgan’s model would survive for a century until the Moore’s Law era descendants of Gould (the financial pirates of the 1980s)  started another round of creative destruction in the evolution of the corporate form.

From Hall’s Law to Moore’s Law

Hall’s Law was the prequel to Moore’s Law in almost every way.  The comparison is not a narrow one based on just one dimension like finance or technology. It spans every important variable. Here is the corresponding Double Freytag:

I’ll save my analysis of the Moore’s Law era for another day, but here is a short point-by-point mapping/comparison of fundamental dynamics (i.e. things that were a consequence of the fundamental dynamics rather than historical accidents).

1. Obviously Hall’s Law maps to Moore’s Law
2. Increasing interchangeability in mechanical engineering maps to increasing transistor counts in semiconductor manufacturing. Increasing machine speeds map to increasing chip clock-rates.
3. Both technologies radically drove down costs of goods and created de facto higher standards of living
4. Both technologies saw the emergence of a new breed of tycoons within a few leadership generations. Jack Welch maps to Cornelius Vanderbilt. Bill Gates and Michael Dell map to Rockefeller and Carnegie. Jeff Bezos maps to Montgomery Ward and Sears.
5. The newer, younger “digital native” tycoons, starting with Zuckerberg, map to the post 1890 3rd generation innovators who were native to the new world of interchangeability rather than pioneers, similar to the early 20th century automobile and airplane industry tycoons (it is revealing that the Wrights were bicycle mechanics; bicycles were the first major consumer product to be designed around interchangeability from the ground up; the airplane was a result of the careful application of exactly the precise sorts of careful scientific measurement, experimentation and optimization that had been developed in the previous 75 years).
6. Each era was punctuated in the middle by a recessionary decade marked by financial excesses, as the economy retooled around the new infrastructure. The 1870s maps to the 2000s.
7. Each era enabled, and was in turn fueled by, new kinds of warfare, exemplified by major wars that disturbed a balance of power that had been maintained by old technology. The American Civil War maps to the Cold War, while the wars of the 1990s and 2000s are analogous to World War I.
8. Guns (including high-tempo machine guns) with interchangeable parts map to nuclear weapons. John Hall’s stint at Harper’s Ferry was the Manhattan Project of its day (here the mapping is not exact, since semiconductors were spawned by the military-industrial research infrastructure around electronics that emerged after World War II, rather than through the Manhattan project itself).
9. Lincoln’s assassination is eerily similar to Kennedy’s. Just checking to see if you are still paying attention. The first person to call bullshit on this point gets a free copy of The Tycoons.
10. The Internet and container shipping taken together are to Moore’s Law as the railroad, steamship and telegraph networks taken together were to Hall’s Law. The electric power grid provides the continuity between Hall’s Law and Moore’s Law.
11. Each era changed employment patterns and class structures wholesale. Hall’s Law destroyed nobility-based social structures, created a new middle class defined by educational attainments and consumer goods, and created paycheck employment. Moore’s Law is currently destroying each of these things and creating a Trading Up class, a new model of free agency, and killing education-based reputation models.
12. A new mass entertainment model started in each case. With Hall’s Law it was Broadway (which led on to radio, movies and television). With Moore’s Law, I’d say the analogy is to reality TV, which like Broadway represents new-era content in an old-era medium.
13. At the risk of getting flamed, I’d say that Seth Godin is arguably the Horatio Alger of today, but in a good way. Somebody has to do the pumping-up and motivating to inspire the masses to abandon the old culture and embrace the new by offering a strong and simple message that is just sound enough to get people moving, even if it cannot withstand serious scrutiny.
14. Hall’s Law led on to the application of its core methods to people, leading to new models of high-school and college education and eventually the perfect interchangeable human, The Organization Man. Moore’s Law is destroying these things, and replacing them with Y-Combinator style education and co-working spaces (this will end with the Organization Entrepreneur, a predictably-unique individual, just like everybody else).
15. Hall’s Law led to the industrial labor movement. Moore’s Law is leading to a new labor movement defined, in its early days, by things like standardized term-sheets for entrepreneurs ( the 5 day/40 hour week issue of our times; YC-entrepreneurs are decidedly not the new capitalists. They are the new labor. That’s a whole other post).
16. And perhaps most importantly, each era suffered an early crisis of financial exploitation which led first to loophole closing, and then to a new financial system and corporate governance model. Jay Gould maps to the architects of the subprime crisis. No J. P. Morgan figure has emerged to really clean up the mess, but new corporate models are already emerging that look so unlike traditional ones that they really shouldn’t be called corporations at all (hence the pointless semantic debate around my history of corporations post; it is really irrelevant whether you think corporations are dying or being radically reinvented. You are talking about the same underlying creative-destruction reality).

The New Gilded Age

When Mark Twain coined the term Gilded Age, he wasn’t exactly being complimentary. For some reason, the term seems to be commonly used as a positive one today, by those who want to romanticize the period.

I started to read the book and realized that Twain had completely missed the point of what was happening around him (the focus of the novel is political corruption; an element that loomed large back then, but was ultimately a sideshow), so I abandoned it.

But he got one thing right: the name.

Hall’s Law created a culture that was initially a layer of fake gloss on top of much grimmer realities. Things were improving dramatically, but it probably did not seem like it at the time, thanks to the anxiety and uncertainty. Just as you and I aren’t exactly celebrating the crashing cost of computers in the last two decades, those who lived through the 1870s were more worried about farming moving ever westward (outsourcing) and strange new status dynamics that made them uncertain of their place in the world.

It took time for Gilded to turn into Golden (about 50 years by my estimate, things became truly golden only after World War II). There were decades of turmoil which made the lives of transitional generations quite miserable. The 1870s were a you’ll-thank-me-later decade, but for those who lived through the decade in misery, that is no consolation.

I abandoned The Gilded Age within a few pages. It is decidedly tedious compared to Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Sadly, Twain’s affection for a vanishing culture, which made him such an able observer of one part of American life, made him a poor observer of the new realities taking shape around him.

He makes a personal appearance in the stories of both Vanderbilt and Rockefeller, and appears to have strongly disliked the former and admired the latter, though both were clearly cut from the same cloth.

To my mind, Twain’s best stab at describing the transformation (probably A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court — note the significance of Connecticut) is probably much worse than the attempts of younger writers like Edith Wharton and later, of course, everybody from Horatio Alger to F. Scott Fitzgerald.

We are clearly living through a New Gilded Age today, and Bruce Sterling’s term “Favela Chic”  (rather unfortunately cryptic ; perhaps we should call it “Painted Slum”) is effectively analogous to “Gilded Age.”

We put on brave faces as we live through our rerun of the 1870s. We celebrate the economic precariousness of free agency as though it were a no-strings-attached good thing.  We read our own Horatio Alger stories, fawn over new Silicon Valley millionaires and conveniently forget the ones who don’t make it.

New Media tycoons like Arrington and Huffington fight wars that would have made the Hearsts and Pulitzers of the Gilded Age proud, while us lesser bloggers go divining for smaller pockets of attention with dowsing rods, driven by the same romantic hope that drove  the tragicomic heroes of P. G. Wodehouse novels to pitch their plays to Broadway producers a century ago.

History is repeating itself. And the rerun episode we are living right now is not a pleasant one.

The problem with history repeating itself of course, is that sometimes it does not. The fact that 1819-1880 map pretty well to 1959-2012 does not mean that 2012-2112 will map to 1880-1980. Many things are different this time around.

But assuming history does repeat itself, what are we in for?

If the Moore’s Law endgame is the same century-long economic-overdrive that was the Hall’s Law endgame, today’s kids will enter the adult world with prosperity and a fully-diffused Moore’s Law all around them.

The children will do well. In the long term, things will look up.

But in the long term, you and I will be dead.

 Some thanks are due for this post. It was inspired in part by Chris McCoy of YourSports.com, who badgered me about the Internet = Railroad analogy enough that I was motivated to go hunt for the best place to anchor a broader analogy. His original hypothesis is now the generalized point 10 of my list. Thanks also to Nick Pinkston for interesting discussions on the future of post-Moore’s Law manufacturing; the child may resurrect its devoured parent after all. Also thanks to everybody who commented on the History of Corporations piece. 

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A Bill Gates Roy Amara quote I encountered last week reminds me strongly of compound interest.

“We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten.”

I hadn’t heard this line before, but based on anecdotal evidence, I think s Amara was right to zeroth order, and it is a very smart comment. The question is why this happens. I think the answer is that we are naturally wired for arithmetic, but exponential thinking is unnatural.  But I haven’t quite worked it out yet. We probably use some sort of linear prediction that first over-estimates and then under-estimates the underlying exponential process, but where does that linear prediction come from?

Anyone want to take a crack at an explanation? I could be wrong. Compound interest/exponential thinking might have nothing to do with it.

***

When I write, I generally start with some sort of interesting motif, like the Gates quote, that catches my eye, which I then proceed to attempt to unravel. Sometimes it turns out there’s nothing there, and sometimes a trivial starting point can fuel several thousand words of exploration.

I call this the “just add attention” model of writing.  It’s like just-add-water concentrates. A rich motif will yield a large volume of mind fuel if you just dissolve it in a few hours of informed attention.

The previous nugget is an example. If I were to let it simmer for a few days and then sat down to do something with the Gates quote, I would probably be able to spin a 4000-word post from it.  I figured I’d let you guys take a crack at this one.

My hit rate has been steadily improving. Nowadays, when I suspect that something will sustain exploration to such and such a depth, I am almost always right.

I prefer the word motif to words like pattern or clue, because it is more general. A motif merely invites attention. By contrast, a pattern attracts a specific kind of analytical attack, and a clue sets up a specific kind of dissonance.

***

The nature of just-add-attention writing explains why it is hard for me to write short posts. If I wrote short posts, they’d just be too-clever questions with no answers, or worse, cryptic motifs offered with no explanation.

You cannot really compress just-add-attention writing. You can only dehydrate it back into a concentrate. Just-add-attention writing has a generative structure but no clear extensive structure. It is like a tree rather than a human skeleton.

By this I mean that you can take the concentrate — the motif — and repeatedly apply a particular generative process to it to get to what you an extensive form. But this extensive form has no clear structure at the extensive level. At best, it has some sort of fractal structure. A human skeleton is a spine with four limbs, a rib cage and a skull attached. A tree is just repeated tree-iness.

But I hesitate to plunge forward and call all generative-extensive forms fractal, as you might be tempted to do. Fractal structures have more going on.

***

Just-add-attention writing is partially described well by Paul Graham’s essay about writing essays, which somebody pointed out to me after I posted my dense writing piece a few weeks back. But I don’t think it is the same as the Graham model. I think the Graham model  involves more conscious guidance from a separate idea about the aesthetics of writing, sort of like bonsai.

Just-add-attention writing is driven by its own aesthetic. This can lead to unpredictable results, but you get a more uncensored sense of whether an idea is actually beautiful.

Dense writing is related to just-add-attention in a very simple way: making something dense is a matter of partially dehydrating an extensive form again, or stopping short of full hydration in the first place. Along with pruning of bits that are either hard to dilute or have been irreversibly over-diluted.

Why would you want to do that? Because just-add-attention writing can sort of sprawl untidily all over the place. Partially dehydrating it again makes it more readable, at the cost of making it more cryptic.

This add-attention/dehydrate again process can be iterated with some care and selectivity to create interesting artistic effects. It reminds me of a one-word answer Xianhang Zhang posted on Quora to the question, “how do you chop broccoli?” Answer: “recursively.”

Regular writing can be chopped up like a potato. Just-add-attention writing must be chopped up like a broccoli. It is more time consuming. That’s why I cannot do what some people innocently suggest, simply serializing my longer pieces as a sequence of arbitrarily delineated parts. I have never successfully chopped up a long piece into two shorter pieces. At best, I have been able to chop off a straggling and unfinished tail end into another draft and then work that separately.

***

Not all generative processes lack extensive structure. The human skeleton is after all, also the product of a generative process (ontogeny). To take a simpler example, the multiplication table for 9 is defined by a generative rule (9 times n), but also has an extensive structure:

09
18
27
36
45
54
63
72
81
90

In case you didn’t learn this trick in grade school, the extensive structure is that you can generate this table by writing the numerals 0-9 twice in adjacent columns, in ascending and descending order.

If you wanted to blog the multiplication table for 9, and had to keep it to one line. You could use either:

• The nine times table is generated by multipling 1, 2,…, n  by 9, or
• Write down 0-9 in ascending order and then in descending order in the next column

Both are good compressions, though the second is more limited. But this is rare. In general a sufficiently complex generative process will produce an extensive-form output that cannot then be compressed by any means other than rewinding the process itself.

***

Just-add-attention writing is easy for those who can do it, but not everybody can do it. More to the point, of the people who can do it, a significant majority seem to find it boring to do. It feels a little bit like folding laundry. It is either a chore, or a relaxing experience.

What sort of people can do it?

On the nature front, I believe you need a certain innate capacity for free association. Some people cannot free associate at all. Others free associate wildly and end up with noise. The sweet spot is being able to free associate with a subconscious sense of the quality of each association moderating the chain reaction. You then weave a narrative through what you’ve generated. The higher the initial quality of the free association, the easier the narrative weaving becomes.

On the nurture front, this capacity for high-initial-quality free association cannot operate in a vacuum. It needs data. A lot of data, usually accumulated over a long period of time. What you take in needs to age and mature first into stable memories before free association can work well on this foundation. The layers have to settle. By my estimate, you have to read a lot for about 10 years before you are ready to do just-add-water writing effectively.

Unfortunately, initial conditions matter a lot in this process, because our n+1 reading choice tends to depend on choices n and n-1.  The reading path itself is guided by free association. But since item n isn’t usable for fertile free association until, say, you’ve read item n+385, there is a time lag. So your reading choices are driven by partly digested reading choices in the immediate past.

So if you make the wrong choices early on, your “fill the hopper” phase of about 10 years could go horribly wrong and fill your mind with crap. Then you get messed-up effects rather than interesting ones.

So there is a lot of luck involved initially, but the process becomes a lot more controlled as your memories age, adding inertia.

***

This idea that just-add-attention writing is driven by aged memories of around 10 years of reading suggests that the process works as follows.

When you recognize a motif as potentially interesting, it is your stored memories sort of getting excited about company. “Interesting” is a lot of existing ideas in your head clamoring to meet a new idea. That’s why you are sometimes captivated by an evocative motif but cannot say why. You won’t know until your old ideas have interviewed the new idea and hired it. Motif recognition is a screening interview conducted by the ideas already resident in your brain.

Or to put it in a less overwrought way, old ideas act as a filter for new ones. Badly tuned filters lead to too-open or too-closed brains. Well-tuned ones are open just the right amount, and in the right ways.

Recognition must be followed by pursuit. This is the tedious-to-some laundry-folding process of moderated free association. It is all the ideas in your head interrogating the new one and forming connections with it.

Finally, the test of whether something interesting has happened is whether you can extract a narrative out of the whole thing, once the interviewing dies down.

A good free association phase will both make and break connections. If your brain only makes connections, it will slowly freeze up because everything will be connected to everything else. This is as bad as nothing being connected, because you have no way to assess importance.

The pattern of broken and new connections (including those formed/broken in distant areas) guides your narrative spinning.

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I rarely listen to music anymore. Strange anxieties and fears seem to flood into my head when I try. When I seek comfort in sound these days, I tend to seek out non-human ones. The sorts of soundscapes that result from technological and natural forces gradually inter-penetrating each other.

At the Mira Flores lock, the gateway into the Pacific Ocean at the southern end of the Panama Canal, you can listen to one such soundscape: the idling of your vessel’s engine, mixed with the flapping and screeching of seabirds. The draining of the lock causes fresh water to pour into salt water, killing a new batch of freshwater fish every 30-45 minutes. The seabirds circle, waiting for the buffet to open.

***

The seabirds have adapted to a world created by human forces better than humans themselves. They reconcile the technological and the natural without suffering agonies. They have smoothly reconstructed their identities without worrying about labels like  transhumanist or paleohumanist. There is neither futurist eagerness nor primitivist yearning to their adaptation. They do not strain impatiently to transform into dimly glimpsed future selves, nor do they strive with quixotic energy to return to an imagined original hunter-gatherer self.

If they do not strain to transform, they also do not strive for constancy.  No doctrine of seabirdism elevates current contingencies into eternal values that imprison. The seabirds feast without worry on the unexpected bounty of salinity-killed fish. They do not ponder whether it is “natural.”

They are thankfully unburdened by the sorts of limiting self-perceptions that we humans enshrine into the doctrine of humanism. I think of humanism as an overweening conception of being flash-frozen into a prescription during a brief window of time in early-modern Europe. A time when humans had just gotten comfortable transforming nature, but had not yet been themselves transformed enough by the consequences to understand what they were doing.

That naked label, humanism, unadorned by prefixes like paleo- or trans-, reveals our continued failure to center our sense of self within larger non-human realities. Our big social brains can invent elaborate anthropomorphic gods and social realities within which we gladly subsume ourselves, but struggle to manufacture a sense of belonging to anything that includes dead fish, seabirds, engineered canal locks and seawater.  Belonging has become an exclusively human idea to humans. We are still mean little inquisitors at the ongoing trial of Copernicus, resisting decentering realities that cannot be recursively reduced to the human. Man makes gods in his own image, blind to the non-human.

And so we distract ourselves with debates about the distinction between natural and artificial while ignoring the far more basic one between human and non-human.

Sometimes being a bird-brain helps. Last year, I decided I was going to be a barbarian.  I am going for bird-brain-barbarian this year.

***

So I rarely listen to music.

Music these days feels like a fog descending on my brain, obscuring visibility and tugging me gently inward into a cocoon of human belonging that promises warmth and security, but delivers an unsettling estrangement from non-human realities. Realities that are knocking with increasing urgency at the door of our species-identity.

Technology is more visual landscape than soundscape, but listening to pleasing human rhythms makes it harder to see technological ones. So even when there are no interesting soundscapes, I prefer silence. It is easy to miss frozen visual music when a soothing voice is piping fog into your brain through your ears. Perhaps all songs are lullabies.

Visible function lends lyricism to the legible but alien rhythms and melodies of technology-shaped landscapes. You can make out some of the words, like crane and unloading, but the song itself is generally impenetrable.

It is perhaps when the lyrics are at their most impenetrable that you can most pay attention to the song.  To understand is to explain. To explain is to explain away and turn your attention elsewhere. Obviousness of function can sometimes draw a veil across form, by encouraging a too-quick settling into a comforting instrumental view of technology.

Oscillating slowly back and forth across sections of the Panama Canal, you will see strange boats carrying dancing fountains. I missed what the tour guide said, so I have no idea what this is.

Perhaps a fire-fighting boat of some sort, or a dredging vessel. But I don’t need to know. One of the minor benefits of an engineering education is a confidence in your ability to fathom function if the need arises, leaving you free to appreciate pure form without a sense of anxiety. Looking at this water-dancer of a boat, I found myself wondering about the place of this beast on a larger spectrum.

On one end you find the Old Faithful geyser at Yellowstone National Park:

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Every interesting thing in my life has been the result of scratching at some weird itch. Every screwed-up thing has been the result of ignoring such itches and attempting to follow some mature-sounding social script instead.

Last year, through my travels and field trips,  I was intrigued to discover that itch-scratchers are disproportionately represented in the readership here on Ribbonfarm. Which is how many of us ended up on the Sausalito docks listening to Sam Penrose talking about outlaw living on houseboats. Or how I ended up inside the storm drains under Las Vegas with Laura Wood.

Reflecting on all this led me to wonder: What would happen if you put a bunch of itchy-scratchy types in a room together? Let’s find out.

I am pleased to announce that on Saturday March 3rd, at the San Francisco Zoo, between 10 AM and 3 PM, along with a few itchy-scratchy co-conspirators, I will be hosting and partially sponsoring the first ever barcamp related to the themes of this blog: Refactor Camp 2012.

All itchy-scratchy types are invited. Use the promotional code EARLYBIRD to register before 10 PM, Thursday Feb 16th, and get $10 off the $40 general registration. You can get one of the limited student reservations if you are a registered student somewhere ($10), or one of the sponsor tickets ($100) if you want to help cover the costs, since I am subsidizing it a bit. Our meeting space is limited to about 40 people max.

The event will run from 10 AM to 3 PM, in one of the meeting rooms at the zoo (with WiFi), and will include lunch, all-day coffee and admission to the zoo.

So sign up now. And then come back and continue reading to find out why a zoo, why the theme is “generativity and captivity” and what any of this has to do with scratching itches and refactoring perceptions.

What’s Included

Besides lunch, coffee and WiFi that is.

The main event page  has an evolving speaker and topic agenda. So far I have 4 confirmed speakers (besides myself that is): Sam Penrose, Jane Huang, Nick Pinkston and Greg Rader.

Each has helped me see very interesting things in the last year, and I am challenging them to do the same for a larger group, with a quick 10 minute whiteboard-only talk.

We’ll weave a loose barcamp style workshopping agenda around what they have to say. I expect to add a couple more speakers at most, but the rest of the time will be open time that we’ll structure as we see fit. You’ll be able to propose your own mini-sessions or speaking topics, and we’ll do the barcamp thing of voting on what we want to fill the time with.

Somewhere along the way, we’ll go look at the zoo.

I can’t predict what you’ll get out of it. It’s an experiment. You might turn an itch into a fully fleshed out passion project that keeps you awake for the rest of the week. Or you might just discover that you like giraffes more than zebras. Or you might just have an interesting time meeting people who are up to strange things.

Generativity and Captivity

I’ve often wondered about the difference between using external, social scripts to guide your actions (such as “American Dream” or “Write a novel” or “Do a YC startup”) versus being driven by strange impulses that may or may not conform to specific scripts. These are the itch-scratching behaviors that can snowball into either major passion projects or madness.

For example, I’ve had a “container-shipping itch” for years now, and it keeps snowballing in broad, metaphoric ways. I have no idea where it is taking me.

When scripts and itches align, great things can happen.

When they don’t, you have a choice.

If you let the script over-rule the itch, you end up feeling trapped by it. Both cubicle life and free-agent life are scripts. So are things like “write a novel.” Scripts are “be somebody” paths.

If you let the itch over-rule the script, you end up unleashing a lot of demented energy. Energy that can lead to obsessive-compulsive behavior. Itch scratching is a “do something” path.

The cost is that you may break scripts. You never know where an itch-scratching may lead. Script-breaking for the hell of it is a stupid idea. But script-breaking as an unintended consequence of scratching an itch always seems to trigger interesting events in my life. They may be good or bad, but they won’t be boring.

Itch scratching destabilizes your life.

With me for instance, shipping containers have become a motif for a more generalized itch. I have no idea whether that will lead to a book, a journey around the world, a painting, a video game, quitting blogging to join the merchant marines, or an idea for a start-up.

It’s simply an itch. It makes me do certain things.

Itchy-scratchy lives naturally trigger the tension between generativity and captivity. That’s what I want to poke at and explore, with others who are good at it.

Why the Zoo?

The field trips we did last year (four of them) convinced me that you only get interesting things out of your head if you put interesting things in.

Zoos have always left me both fascinated and ambivalent. On the one hand, they are critical in conservation efforts and the only way we can get up close and personal with 99% of the living world. They also seem to be the only way to keep some species going (there are now more tigers in captivity in American than in the wild in India, for instance).

On the other hand, we do keep wild things unnaturally captive in zoos, there’s no getting around that. In modern zoos, very humanely captive, but still captive. Some species are undoubtedly happier and genuinely better off as well (after all, dogs and cats self-domesticated around ancient humans), but for other species, captivity is somewhere between a mixed blessing and a curse.

The only real justification is that we do this to ourselves as well. We are one of the latter species for whom captivity is a mixed blessing. The only real difference is that our zoo cages are the scripts of civilized life.

Like zoo animals, we live safer and longer lives than we would in the wild, but like them, it leaves us restless, with no outlet for wild, barbarian instincts.

Whichever you look at them, zoos throw up difficult questions about both our relationship with nature and our own self-imposed “civilized” condition.

I hope those questions provide an interesting context for thinking about generativity, captivity and itch-scratching.

Why “Refactor Camp”

Finally, why “Refactor Camp”?

Well, refactored perceptions is the quixotic tagline of this blog, and I’ve come to realize that the main way you get to interesting and unusual perspectives on the world is to simply scratch an itch and go wherever that takes you. And one day, you find that you have ended up somewhere with a strange view of familiar things.

Scratching itches is how you do refactored perception.

So, see you on March 3rd, with an itch. Let’s see where we end up. Here are the links again.

The event page, with evolving details of agenda, speakers etc. Refactor Camp 2012.

The registration page (also linked from the page above): sign up.

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Now for something a little different and spectacularly self-absorbed.

Several of you have suggested over the years that I should make up some sort of helpful landing page to get new readers oriented. I’ve been mulling how to do that in an interesting and helpful way for quite a while now, and about six months ago, I settled upon the idea of a conceptual map. This is the first draft.

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– 1 –

Naming and counting are the two most basic behaviors in our divided brains. Naming is the atomic act of association, recognition, contextualization and synthesis. Counting is the atomic act of separation, abstraction, arrangement and analysis. Each behavior contains the seed of the other.

To name a thing is to invite it to ensnare itself in your mind; to distill and compress the essence of a gestalt into a single evocative motif, from which it can be regenerated at will. Just add attention and stir.

Here are three very different American gestalts that I bet many of you will recognize without clicking: Babbitt, Bobbitt, Rabbit.

We name and count babies, products, species, theorems, countries, asteroids, ships, drugs, essays, wars, gods, dogs, foods, alcohols, pieces of legislation, judicial pronouncements, wars, subcultures, ocean currents and seasonal winds.

We try to name and number every little transient vortex, in William James’ blooming, buzzing confusion, that persists long enough for us to form a thought about it.

As with plans, so with names. Names are nothing; naming is everything. To name a thing is to truly know it. As Ursula Le Guin said, “for magic consists in this, the true naming of a thing.”

It is the process of naming that is important. The actual name that you settle on at the end is secondary.

– 2 –

Vanity and pragmatism wrestle for control of the act of naming.  We bend one ear towards history and the other towards posterity. We parse for unfortunate rhymes and garbled pronunciations. We attempt at once to situate and differentiate. We count syllables and look for domain names.

We walk around the name, viewing it as parent, lover, friend, bully, journalist, lexicographer and historian.  We embed it in imaginary headlines and taunting rhymes.

In Bali to name is to number. It is an unsatisfying synthesis that only works in limited contexts.

“The firstborn is “Wokalayan” (or Yan, for short), second is “Made,” third is “Nyoman” or Komang (Man or Mang for short), and fourth is “Ketut” (often elided to Tut).

I am not sure what happens if Wokalayan dies young. Does Made replace his older sibling and become the new Wokalayan?

In crypotgraphy, the first named-character in an example scenario is Alice. The second one is Bob. And so on down an alphabetic cast of characters. This is not the world of  interchangeable John and Jane Doe figures.  The order matters.

When birth order is more important individual personality, you get a social order in naming that inhabitants of individualistic modernity struggle to understand.

– 3 –

Counting is both ordinal and cardinal. It takes a while to appreciate the difference between one, two, three… and first, second, third.

To truly count is to know both processes intimately. In naming, ordinality has to do with succession and replacement. Cardinality has to do with interchangeability. You cannot master naming without mastering counting.

The ordinal, cardinal and nominal serve to situate and uniquely identify, but do not necessarily indicate the presence of something real. Hence the query: name, rank and number? 

There was once a substance with rank 0, number 0. It was named ether. It did not actually exist. Substances 1-1 through 1-4 though, earth, fire, water and wind, were real enough, and became the founding fathers and mothers of the modern discipline of chemistry.

It is in fact useful to think of naming an interrogative act that creates what it questions. Demand insistently enough to know the name, rank and number of a thing, and you will eventually find out. Even if your mind has to manufacture an answer.

When you understand both kinds of counting, you can count and name in both ways, without using actual numbers.

That gives you iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad on the one hand, and Kodiak, Cheetah, Puma, Jaguar, Panther, Tiger, Leopard, Snow Leopard and Lion, on the other. I’ll leave you to guess why the first-born is a bear here, while the rest are cats. Don’t give up and click too soon.

Not many languages can efficiently express questions of ordinality. In English for instance, the question, what is your birth-order ordinality among your siblings? sounds downright weird, but I cannot find a simpler, grammatical way to express it.

It is much easier to ask the related cardinality question: how many siblings do you have? 

Curiously, the ordinal question is very easy to ask in my nominal native language of Kannada. It would translate to something like: How many-eth son are you of your father? If such constructs were allowed in English. At least that was the best I could come up with my father challenged me to translate the line as a kid.

It would be a useful construct to have in English. We could ask, What-ieth major version of Mac OS X is Lion? 

The naming practices in Bali and the Ursula Le Guin quote made me think of a rather clever idea for a short story about a culture where the young start out with ordinal names as in Bali, but are given true names if and when wise elders first spot the child in an act that expresses a unique individuality.

At this point, a coming-of-age naming ceremony is conducted, and the child is declared an adult with special privileges over the un-named. Rather complicated things happened to the hero’s name in the story, having to do with self-referential paradoxes. I’ve forgotten the plot, but I remember that at the time I had to diagram the events in the story.

I never wrote the story because coming up with names for the characters was too hard.

– 4 –

We name to liberate, and we name to imprison. We name to flatter, and we name to insult.  We name to own, and we name to be owned. We name to subsume, and have subsumed. We name to frame, and we name to reframe.

Google bought Urchin on Demand and turned it into Google Analytics. It bought Youtube and left the name alone.

The Left calls it Right to Choose. The Right calls it Right to Life. The debate itself is partly about naming: at what point does something deserve the name human?

The British and the French built a plane together and fought over the name. The French won. It became the Concorde rather than the Concord. 

Gandhi attempted to rename the untouchables Harijans. God’s people. They resented being patronized, and chose for themselves the name Dalit. The oppressed.

Priests weigh about the numerological significance of names and marketing mavens opine about syllable counts.

States step in with Procrustean templates to tax and conscript: last name, first name, middle initial. Under Spanish rule, the entire Philippines became a geographic-lexicographic state.

Philosophers ponder the metaphysics of naming and Greek scholars hunt for their linguistic roots.

As one anthropologist said (I have never managed to find the source), naming is never a culturally insignificant act.

– 5 –

To name is to appreciate the crucial distinction, due to urban theorist John Friedmann, between appreciative knowledge and manipulative knowledge. The one allows us to construct “satisfying images of the world.” The other allows us to gain mastery over it.

To either number or name is to both appreciate and manipulate.  To number is to appreciate timeless order; to name is to appreciate transformative chaos.

You number to extend and preserve. Archival is the ultimate act of numbering.

You name to create, destroy, fragment and churn. You name a product and launch it. You give a dog a bad name and hang it.

In a break with family tradition, I was not named after my paternal grandfather. The timeless sequence, …ABABAB… was broken.

– 6 –

Agent 007, James Bond, was named after an ornithologist.

In his numbered world, he is part of a greater order. A world of conversations between 007 and M, where technology comes from Q and even the secretary is a very countable Moneypenny. It is a timeless world where the M’s and Q’s are replaceable and 00s are both replaceable and interchangeable.

In his named world, first he situates, then he differentiates.

My name is Bond. James Bond.

A tough, hard and unusual name, for a tough, hard guy, who allows glimpses of a dark past to shine through the veneer of shaken-not-stirred cocktails and social polish. He blends in, but makes his presence felt. It is a name that is at once a trust and a threat. Bank of England to friends, gunboats to foes.

Is that a threat? No, it’s a promise. 

Commander Bond was once a naval reserve officer. It was in the maritime world that the line, “my name is my bond,” gained currency.

It is a name of narrative belonging. It situates the man strongly as British, but differentiates him not at all among Britishers. In Bond is the veiled threat of a still-potent dying empire. In James lies identification with, and anonymity within, that dying Empire.

Fleming once wrote to the real Bond’s wife:  ”It struck me that this brief, unromantic, Anglo-Saxon  and yet very masculine name was just what I needed, and so a second James Bond was born.”

– 7 –

The story of Windows is the story of a wild tree of apparently domesticated numbers seeking its way in the world, rather than an orderly parade of tamed wild cats.

1.0, 2.0, 3.0, NT, 3.1, 95, 98, ME, 2000, XP, Vista, 7, 8.

This is no accident. Microsoft, has always been a company that has sought its way in the existing world, rather than inviting the world into a fabricated universe of non sequiturs like Apple, Macintosh and Lisa.

The original portmanteau, MICRO-computer SOFT-ware, was a seeking of a place in a world defined by others. The micro-computer was ordinally a lesser thing than the mini-computer. Soft-ware was one of three wares: hard, soft and firm. An element in a set of cardinality three. It was a shy, retiring and polite name, that knew its place in the scheme of things.  

But the personality worked, and Microsoft quietly took over the universe it entered so politely. Windows was a literal-minded appropriation of the name of a key element of the desktop metaphor. Office seeks to belong in the workplace rather than redefine it. Internet Explorer remains the only browser that presumes to name itself after the thing it explores.

How a company names itself, its products and services, and its organizational parts, tells you a great deal about it.

To number something — implicitly or explicitly, cardinally or ordinally — is the first step in a grander project to order, tag and classify a part of reality; to prepare it for timeless forms of manipulation: replacement and interchange. To number is to subsume the particular within the general.

But to really name something in the sense of Le Guin, is to disrupt that project at every turn by discovering new magic that confounds the creeping logic of a rigidly ontological enterprise.

To really name is to find leaks as quickly as the number-givers find water-tight categories. To break connections thought secure and make new ones, previously considered impossible. To create difference — irreplaceability and non-interchangeability — as fast as numbering creates homogeneity.

This is perhaps why I still trust Microsoft more than I trust Apple. In the mess that is the the Windows sequence-numbering, I find reassurance.

– 8 –

To position is to number and name at the same time, and create something that is both a being and a becoming. Something rooted, that seeks to connect and get along, and something restless that seeks to get ahead and away.

To position a thing is to teach it to get ahead, get along, and get away. We project onto the memetic world of names, our own fundamental genetically-ordained proclivities. Evolutionary biology tells us that getting ahead and getting along are the basic drives that govern life for a social species. To this, as a species that invented individualism sometime in the 10th century AD, we must add getting away. The drive to become more than a rank and number. To become a name, even if the only available one, alpha, is taken.

The Microsoft version soup is Darwin manifest.

Getting ahead, getting along and getting away. Ordinal numbering, cardinal numbering and naming. Name, rank and number.

Perhaps it is naming and numbering that are fundamental, not biology.

To number well is to comprehend symmetries and anticipate as-yet-unnamed realities; holes in schemata, to be filled in the future. And so we name new elements before discovering them, imagine antimatter when we only know of matter. To categorize well is to create timeless order. Mendeleev’s bold leap advanced both chemistry and the art and science of naming.

To number poorly  is to squeeze, stuff and snip. To constrain reality to our fearful and limited conception of it.

To name well is to challenge and court numbers.

To name poorly is to kill or be killed by numbers.

Naming without numbering creates a chaotic unraveling. Numbering without naming creates orderly emptiness.

It takes discipline to couple the two forces together. And sometimes, numbers and names dance together beautifully to create magic, as when Murray Gell-Mann found inspiration in James Joyce’ line, three quarks for Muster Mark. 

– 9 –

To name is also to hide and cloak. To switch stories and manufacture realities.  This is the world of Don Draper. He dons a mask, and drapes new realities over old ones.  Starting with his own life.

And so Operation Infinite Justice became Operation Enduring Freedom.

I was supposed to be named after my grandfather, in keeping with the timeless …ABABAB… rhythm. I would have been Rama Rao. But then they broke with tradition.

My mother wanted to name me Rahul, but my grandmother objected: it is a name with deep significance for Buddhists — the name of the Buddha’s son.

Fortunately, in the (cardinal and ordinal) universe of a thousand names that is Vishnu — there is actually a long hymn known as the Vishnu Sahasranama, “Vishnu of the Thousand Names” — a close cousin of Rama was found.

And so I came into the world as Venkatesh. A break from tradition, but not quite a complete break.  Certainly not a defection to a competing tradition. That would have upset my grandmother.

I once wanted to name an algorithm I’d developed Mixing Bandits, since it used mechanisms inspired by bandit processes. I gave a draft of my paper to a distinguished professor in the field. He liked my work, but objected to the name. My allusive overloading of a precise term did not sit well with him. Mathematically, my algorithm was not related enough to bandit processes.

So this grandmother rejected the baby, refusing to absorb it into the family tradition. It wanders the world today as an illegitimate orphan of the noble clan that has disavowed it, under the clumsy and undistinguished name MixTeam scheduling.

– 10 –

In the genealogy of a single name you can trace entire grand narratives.

Once upon a time, there was a company in Rochester called Haloid. It made photographic paper and lived in the giant shadow of a company across town called Kodak.

Haloid wanted to grow up. So it acquired a technology called xerography: a name coined by a Greek scholar to situate the idea of dry writing within the illegible history of that long intellectual tradition within which the West seeks to situate everything it does.

Ironically, the technology was not the result of a long, gradually evolving tradition that can be traced back to the Greeks. Not only did the Greeks have nothing to do with it, as the biographer of the technology David Owen notes, “There was no one in Russia or France who was working on the same thing. The Chinese did not invent it in the 11th century BC.”

Xerography sprang almost fully-formed from the mind of one man, Chester Carlson. He systematically set about the project of inventing and patenting something truly new. He managed to do so by putting an obscure property of the element Selenium to a completely unexpected use.

So Haloid became Haloid Xerox, and eventually just Xerox. It is a powerful name. So powerful that it subsumed the name of the man who created it, Joe Wilson. During my time at Xerox, the Wilson Center for Research and Technology (WCRT) became the Xerox Research Center, Webster (XRCW). Across the world you will find XRCE (Europe), XRCC (Canada) and XRCI (India). To earn its right to a unique name within this orderly namespace, the sole rebel, PARC, had to unleash planet-disrupting forces.

Xerography eventually became electrophotography, in the hands of envious competitors who appeared after the trust-busters had done their work. The name that had gotten ahead and away now had to get along. My name is photography. Electro-photography. 

They still call it xerography at Xerox though.

– 11 –

And across town, Kodak slowly declined and began to die. There is irony here as well.

Photography does have a long history. The ancient Greeks did have something to do with it.  The ancient Chinese did know about pinhole cameras. The French did play a role.

But Kodak is one of those rare names that was born through an act of pure invention. George Eastman is quoted as saying about the letter k: ”it seems a strong, incisive sort of letter.”  Yes, incisive like a knife.

The story goes that Eastman and his mother created the name from an anagrams set. Wikipedia says about the process:

Eastman said that there were three principal concepts he used in creating the name: it should be short; one cannot mispronounce it, and it could not resemble anything or be associated with anything but Kodak.

The first two principles are still adhered to by marketers when possible. The last has been abandoned since the 1970s, when the positioning era began.

As with Wilson, the child soon eclipsed the father. Eastman Kodak became just Kodak to the rest of the world. In proving the soundness of his principles of memetic stability, Eastman ceded his own place in the history of naming to a greater name.

Haloid incidentally, is a reference to the binary halogen compounds of Silver used in photography. The word halogen was coined by Berzelius from the words hals (“sea” or “salt”) and gen (“come to be”). Coming to be of the sea. It may be the most perfect name, suggesting the being and becoming that is the essence of both naming and chemistry.

Jöns Jacob Berzelius is a founding father of chemistry in large part due to his prolific naming. He came up with protein as well. He was also responsible for naming Selenium. From the Greek Selene, for Moon.

It was no small achievement. Chemistry is a science of variety and difference. It deals in so many different thing that a narrowly taxonomic mind will fail to appreciate its broader patterns.

In declaring that “Physics is the only real science, all the rest are just stamp collecting,” Rutherford failed to appreciate chemistry the way Berzelius did. As an ongoing grand narrative with lesser and greater patterns.

Some deserving names like protein and others merely abstract, categorical formulas like CnH2n+2 and names that just fall short of cohering into semantic atoms, like completely saturated hydrocarbon.

– 12 –

Counting and naming are at once trivial and profound activities.

Toddlers learn to count starting with One, Two, Three…

Terence Tao has won a Fields Medal and lives numbers like nobody else alive today. And he is still basically learning to count. At levels you and I would consider magic, but it is counting nevertheless.

Toddlers learn to name, starting with  me, mama and dada.

Ursula Le Guin has won five Hugo and six Nebula awards, but is fundamentally still a name-giver.

Names are born of universes, be they small ones that contain only Kodak or large ones that contain all of Western civilization between alpha and omega.

It is very hard to make up universes. It is easier to borrow and disguise them, as Tolkien and Frank Herbert did.

And it is very hard to do so without accidentally causing collisions between large, old namespaces that might not like each other, as my mom found out with Rahul. 

Lazy novelists are laziest with names, and the work falls apart. When you have named every character in your novel perfectly, your novel is finished. Plot and character converge towards perfection as names do.

Names in turn create universes. Carnegie Hall, Carnegie Foundation, Carnegie-Mellon University. 

To name is to choose one universe to draw from and another to create. Rockefeller gave his name to few things. He preferred bland names like Standard Oil and The University of Chicago. 

And so it is that the Carnegie Universe is very visible, while the much larger Rockefeller Universe is more hidden from sight.

– 13 –

Rockefeller chose to create, and hide much of what he created. But you can go further. Beyond hiding lies un-naming. To un-name is to deny identity.

To un-name and un-number is to anonymize completely.

It is useful for the name-giver to ponder the complementary problem of un-naming. If to position is to name and number, to de-position is to un-name and un-number.

You must seek randomness to disrupt the timeless order imposed by numbering, disconnection to counter the narrative order created by naming. Like Dorian Taylor, you must seek cryptonyms.

Cryptonym itself is from the Greek words for “hidden” and “name.”

Randomness is hard.

To un-name is to fight the natural. Given enough time, even a set of cryptonyms will fail to arrest a cohering identity. To truly arrest a name, even changing the crytponym at a random frequency is not enough. The underlying cohering realities must be disrupted.

– 14 –

Names demand to be born, and hijack numbers if no worthy ones appear. And so we have 9-11 and Chapter 11. 

At other times, names strain to hang on to life, with no stories to tell. In the arid, random desert that is bingo, where numbers rule, names struggle.

Only to a Bingo player is 22 “two little ducks.”

Few numbers truly rise to the level of human meaning, and they are all small: 13, 42, 867-5309. 

The largest number in my life that is also a name with permanent narrative significance is 1174831686. 

When I was nine or ten, our local newspaper, The Telegraph, launched a club for kids in its Sunday edition, called the Wiz Biz Club. I signed up excitedly, to belong and to make new friends. That was my membership number.

I received a badge, some stickers and an ID card with that number.

So Venkatesh Rao  became 1174831686.  That cryptonym was probably the start of my struggle to own my name instead of being owned by it.

I am glad to report that despite it being an extremely common Indian name, I now own venkateshrao.com (it redirects to this site) and almost the entire first page of Google results. Vishnu can have the other 999 names, but I plan to pwn this one, at least for one lifetime.

– 15 –

We dimly recognize, even without the aid of mathematicians who study such things, that numbers win this decidedly unequal contest of appreciation and manipulation in the long-term.

In the beginning, we generously allowed our businesses, products and services to share the older namespaces of people and geographies. East India Company, Jardine-Mathieson, Carnegie Steel, Johnson & Johnson.

That strategy quickly exhausted itself, and so we energetically began manufacturing Xeroxes, Kodaks, Microsofts and Apples.

The first really-big-numbers company decided to name itself after a number, Google. Its home became an even bigger number, Googleplex. 

After Google, the Internet began throwing up naming needs faster than humans could manufacture them, and the orderly taxonomy unexpectedly imposed on the world by the Internet Domain Name system suddenly made life very difficult indeed.

So far, we’ve kept up by inventing quasi-algorithmic models: flickr, dopplr, e-widget, i-doodad.

But eventually naming as a way to understand and construct reality will fail.  Technology creates complexity that creeps inexorably towards the unnameable-but-significant.

When semantic genealogies in naming give way to syntactic and lexicographic genealogies, you are halfway to the world of pure numbers (there is a cute scene in Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, where members of an online group decide to abandon names and stick to purely numbering and ranking the world; the split occurs between those who seek cryptonyms and those who seek a fundamental order within which, for instance, Earth might be numbered 1).

The march that begins with Aachen and Aardvark cannot keep up with a universe that throws countable, but not-nameable, variety at us. We count on, long after we can no longer name.  And eventually we cannot count, either, and must stare at an unnameable, uncountable void and wonder — as some mathematicians do — whether it even exists, given how it eludes characterization.

Yet we persist with both naming and numbering, finding solace in imposing a partial lexicographic order on reality, even as the struggle gets harder.

– 16 –

I have not used the word brand even once in this post, until just now. Over the years,  I have lost confidence in the utility of the concept.

It is appropriate only for the cardinal-ordinal world of mass manufacturing, where everything has a rank and number, but very few things have real names. Most brands are McBrands. Billions upon billions have been served up by marketers and fond parents. Most represent no deeper reality than the first answer to the question, name, rank and number. 

It is not surprising. After all the very word originates in processes that evolved superficially distinguish the essentially interchangeable. In the world of cows, and pottery before that, to brand was to mark for identification and counting, and little else.

Brand is an abstraction that adds very little to the more fundamental concepts of naming and numbering, and the key derivative concept of positioning. In fact, it is distracting. The word makes it far too easy to lose yourself in abstractions. Naming and numbering keep you honest and focused on the gestalt you are trying to distill, with repeated tests. The story of these attempts is what we know as PR, and with each proposed naming and positioning test you can ask, do I understand this story yet?

Without such test-driven naming, branding is an exercise in waterfall marketing.

To the extent that it is a useful word at all, it describes a consequence rather than an action. Away from the concrete world of cows being tortured with red-hot irons, there is no actual action that you can call branding.

You name, number and position.  You then make up non-verbal correlates — colors and logos — that derive from these basic elements.

These are things you do.

Brand happens.

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Coded, informal communication — significant messages buried inside innocuous messages — has long interested me.  I don’t mean things like “NX398 VJ899 ABBX3″ that the NSA might deal with (though that’s related). I mean things like this:

You: let’s get coffee sometime

Me: Sure, that’d be great

We both know that the real exchange was:

You: let’s pretend we want to take this further

Me: yeah, let’s do that

The question of how such coded language emerges, spreads and evolves is a big one. I am interested in a very specific question: how do members of an emerging subculture recognize each other in public, especially on the Internet, using more specialized coded language?

The question is interesting because the Web is making traditional subcultures — historically illegible to governance mechanisms, and therefore hotbeds of subversion — increasingly visible and open to cheap, large-scale economic and political exploitation. This exploitation takes the form of attention mining, and is the end-game on the path to what I called Peak Attention a while back.

Does this mean the subversive potential of the Internet is an illusion, and that it will ultimately be domesticated? Possibly.

Mining Subcultural Attention

Manipulation of subcultures through the Internet has been limited to date because the tools are still very new. The mining of large reserves of attention — the largely one-way kind directed at work, beautiful sunsets, or the manufactured pop celebrity du jour for instance — is now a mature science.

Social attention though, trapped within relationships, is the shale oil of attention mining. The institutional world has not yet learned to efficiently mine the attention that is locked up today within subculture-scale social interactions.

As they learn over the next decade, today’s garden-variety subcultures will turn into docile and domesticated micro-markets for businesses, and micro-constituencies for politics. They will cease to be subversive threats, much as the old labor movement, which formed as a reaction to Gilded Age capitalism, ceased to be a threat within about a century. The world moves faster now. The new models of subcultural collective action, I predict, will last less than a decade or two before they become irrelevant. All attention that lives within subcultures is now vulnerable to external control.

Their weakness is that they seek to externalize their structure into digital institutions. Loose and transient P2P network institutions perhaps, but still institutions, due to their reliance on externalized trust, impersonal organizing principles and most importantly, social scaling.

They rely on the power of numbers rather than intelligence. Smart mobs are still mobs. As we will see, they are vulnerable to control, and attractive targets for attention mining. Rather ironically, most of the mechanisms required to observe and control subcultures are being invented by subcultures themselves. External forces are merely stepping in to co-opt them.

But let’s return to coded communication.  That’s where our journey begins.

Impersonal Secret Handshakes

The bulk of coded communication is designed to sustain the polite fictions of civil society, to limit relationships to the depth of immediate transactions, as in the example I started with.

But a proportion of such communication goes the other way: it serves to deepen relationships. Some of this is a matter of widespread convention and ritual, like the classic would you like to come upstairs for a drink? This one is not particularly interesting, because there is no content beyond the accepted meaning of the ritual incantation. It is visible culture, not invisible subculture.

More interesting is coded communication that allows members of a subculture to recognize and interact with each other, without an institutional context.

The most common way to do this is to use a linguistic motif that signals membership of a subculture, via reference to a recognized subcultural text.

If I use the word discourse in a specific way, it will signal baseline membership in postmodernist-pretender subculture.

If I begin an essay with the words: You can check out of Facebook any time you like, but you can never leave, the dropped reference signals a basic awareness of American music to others with a comparable awareness, but seems merely like an odd turn of phrase to others (my parents for instance, would not get this reference).

If you understand the coded message, you’ll respond with a coded message of your own that shows that you got it (perhaps using a phrase like always-already in the first case, or with a reference to a different classic song in the second case).

These are impersonal secret handshakes and have existed forever. They are based on shared cultural texts like the lyrics of Hotel California or immersion in the peculiar vocabulary of an academic subculture.

Hipsters might distinguish themselves from generic pop-culture aficionados by dropping references from Haruki Murakami novels instead of Hotel California, but it is still an impersonal secret handshake, since it is based on recognized common knowledge (stuff that everybody knows everybody knows) within an existing group, defined by its core texts.

The membership precedes the mutual recognition, and the secret handshake serves to validate membership of the group rather than knowledge of the text. The text is a social object with a limited role (note that the manufacture of social objects is slowly becoming a codified science in its own right, a development that is part of the ongoing colonization of subcultural attention). 

Impersonal secret handshakes are fundamentally weak, and the groups they protect are vulnerable to infiltration in very basic ways. Since the group is defined by impersonal texts that serve as common knowledge, strangers can acquire knowledge of the same impersonal texts and become pretenders (such as trustafarians faking poverty to gain access to hipster culture). Some subcultures are much easier to penetrate than others (the cute-kitten-picture subculture for instance), but they are all vulnerable.

Vulnerable to what or whom? To answer the question, we need to switch gears and talk about patterns of social organization for a bit, and where subcultures fit in the larger scheme of things.

Patterns of Social Organization

We are used to thinking about the global social order in terms of a class-culture matrix. This is the scheme upon which institutional social order  – the world of nation-states, corporations and religions — is based.  When you rebel, this is the scheme you try to disrupt. Both types of groupings rely on recognizable markers and boundaries to distinguish themselves from others, and cryptic in-group behaviors and language to sustain necessary opacity.

When a great deal of power is involved, cryptic in-group behaviors can give rise to a refined inner core of  formal institutional secrecy, creating a hidden social order. Though they increasingly seem ludicrous today, secret societies have always been an essential part of maintaining the social order, becoming more or less visible in concert with the waning and waxing of institutional power.

This class-culture organizing scheme is best understood as a global matrix. It is global in scope because it documents mutual recognition between maximally-distant parts: the Chinese Party-Member/Non-Member distinction is recognized globally, as is the American Republican/Democrat distinction. It is a matrix because it is understood in ordered, visual-spatial terms. Class is horizontal, culture is vertical.  This abstract visual ordering induces a literal geographic ordering. So rich and poor, black and white, sort themselves out at every geographic scale from town to nation, fractally embodying a fundamentally simple scheme.

There is another type of social organization, based on subcultures, that has historically served as a check and balance to the power of the class-culture matrix.

Contrary to popular belief, subcultures are not vague constructs. They have a precise, if negative, definition: a subculture is a pattern of social order that is not worth codifying and institutionalizing for the purposes of governance or economic exploitation, under normal circumstances. So subcultures have historically relied on their obscurity, illegibility and unimportance to ensure autonomy and security.

The very existence of a subculture is only known to neighboring subcultures. This limited local visibility suggests that the world of subcultures is not a matrix, but a web. Classic Rock fans can tell Punk Rock apart from other kinds. It all sounds the same to a non Rock-fan. Imperceptible distinctions that make no difference in the larger scheme of things.

Under abnormal circumstances, when seditious sentiments are brewing in the subcultural web, the zero-sum game of power swings in its favor, causing a reaction from the class-culture matrix: increased and more visible action by the hidden institutional order to restore the balance.

When slums start to seethe, the secret police gets going in not-very-secret ways.

If the slums win, subversive subcultures become institutionalized, and displaced ones turn into subcultures. If the slums lose, things stay roughly the same. Either way, the scheme of social organization remains the same: a balance of power between an institutional class-culture matrix and a subcultural web.

This is the world we are used to, and this is the world the Internet is changing. The subcultural web is now being made legible and governable under the harsh light of Facebook Like actions.  Just in time too, since the returns on coarser forms of political and economic exploitation are now rapidly diminishing.  Obama’s victory in the last Presidential election, and the penetration of entities like Groupon into local food subcultures, are just the early signs of where we are headed.

This is a contrarian conclusion. Most commentators today are arguing that the subcultural world is getting stronger, more incomprehensible and increasingly ungovernable.

This is a mix of an illusion, a poor sense of history, and the effects of a temporary learning phase on the part of class-culture matrix institutions. The world of subcultures are about to be comprehensively explored, mapped, tamed and domesticated. The larger the subculture, the faster it will fall.

The subcultural web looks increasingly incomprehensible (and therefore stronger and more ungovernable) to you and me as humans. It does not seem incomprehensible if you peer at it through the increasingly sophisticated instruments of digital governance. Facebook is to marketers and politicians what Google Maps is to travelers.

The poor sense of history is due to the passing of the last living generation that experienced truly terrifying levels of global conflict. Twitter revolutions pale in comparison to World Wars and the immense conflicts of the nineteenth century.

Which brings us to the only serious reason behind the temporary resurgence of subcultural power on an overall downward trajectory: learning lag in the institutional world.

The Taming of Subcultures

I remarked earlier that subcultures are sub-institutional in resolution. There is no Federation of American Hipster Societies with a national president and member organizations each with their own chairpersons, badge-printing machines and envelope-stuffing volunteers. There is no Annual National Hipster Convention that attempts to influence elections, and no zoning ordinances and tax laws that specifically target hipster neighborhoods. And perhaps most importantly, there is no master email list of hipsters that you can use to survey and promote.

But just because subcultures lack impersonal institutions in the traditional sense does not mean that they are personal patterns of social organization. They are not. They are merely illegible to the class-culture matrix working with pre-Internet tools.

Since they only serve a subset of the functions of formal organizations (relying on the class-culture matrix for basics like cars and underwear), they need fewer pieces of externalized infrastructure.

Shared common knowledge texts are often enough. Secret handshakes serve the purpose of one-to-one mutual recognition, and three-way introductions are enough to allow small local groups to cohere. Dress codes, popular haunts and the active-use texts change slowly enough that secret handshakes suffice for all information diffusion. No envelope stuffing or email lists are needed. Punishment for defection — shunning and expulsion — is generally weak and local, because the value of membership is generally weak and local (friends to hang out with, parties to go to, a local economy of favor trading).

Before the Internet came along, it was the sheer number and insignificance of local subcultures that made governance too expensive to bother with.  The risk of the rare seditious uprising could not justify the cost of more fine-grained pre-Internet governance mechanisms.

Businesses sold a modest selection of mass-produced shoes for instance, and produced more of the varieties that sold better. It wasn’t particularly useful to know that hipsters liked Converse sneakers. For politicians, a coarse color-coding of Red and Blue states (in America) and a certain amount of county-level intelligence sufficed to inform election campaigns.

The Internet though, has changed all this. It has allowed subcultures to scale (by moving their secret-handshake institutions online), and become more valuable in the process. While mass-manufactured celebrity cultures have been weakening, we are not returning to pre-mass-media patterns of local culture. Instead, we’ve evolved to mega-subcultures that scale without developing institutions.

And at the same time, the visibility of subcultural behaviors has made governance and exploitation much cheaper and easier. You don’t have to go to a specific neighborhood, in specific clothes, and drop specific references. You can sit at your desk, dress any way you want, and fake your way into any subculture. Long enough to sell a whole lot of shoes.

It will not take long for businesses and politicians to completely master this game.

The outcome is inevitable. Subcultures will be comprehensively tamed. Institutional sociopaths within the class-culture matrix are now in a position to detect and take control of subcultures before they even come into existence. This will lead on to control over the very inception of subcultures.

The Fabrication of Subcultures

Subcultures are vulnerable because they form around shared common-knowledge texts (even if the shared text in question comprises nothing more than a particular vocabulary of new urban slang). In Web terms, today’s invisible — to all but the eye of Big Data crunching AI —  pattern of preferences is tomorrow’s subcultural small world on the global Interest Graph. And tomorrow’s Interest Graph is next week’s Social Graph.

The day is not far off when Amazon will be able to predict, based on book-sales correlations in a given geography, the formation of a new subculture before the first defining event (say a party where an origin-myth is created) ever takes place. It won’t be long before influence mechanisms  emerge, to complement the detection mechanisms.

Today, naive marketers try to clumsily set up online communities framed by their products or services, to attract target subcultures, and generally fail.

Somewhat smarter ones try to “own” relevant conversations, based on identifying core subcultural texts that are adjacent to the product-positioning conversation (the classic example is: want to own the teen tampon market? Set up a community for girltalk). This is marketing-by-peripheral-vision.

The smartest ones try to infiltrate and co-opt existing subcultural communities online.

But all these mechanisms have had very limited success. Because they are all about taming wild subcultures.

But once marketers working with Big Data get ahead of the cultural curve, you can expect the balance of power to shift decisively in their favor. From detecting subcultures before future members themselves do, to actively seeding, breeding and shaping desirable subcultures, is not a big leap to imagine. It will be a world of pre-cognitive marketing, run by quants in data vats.

Taming will turn into domestication.

Today, the marketing machine can at best put its muscle behind a Justin Bieber and create coarse, large-scale culture whose manufactured nature is obvious to all but the dimmest of observers.

Tomorrow, it will be able to create tiny, niche cultures whose members will either sincerely believe that the subculture is their own creation, or ironically not care that it has been manufactured for them to find through engineered serendipity.

A sort of Moore’s Law of cultural fabrication will get underway, and it will eventually be capable of etching an entire subculture within a few city blocks.

Heck, let me go out on a limb and make a Moore’s Law type prediction: the size of the smallest manufacturable subculture will halve in size and transience every 18 months. In 10 years, we’ll have a microprocessor moment: the ability to etch culture at a one-city-block-for-one-month level of resolution. Working in concert with neo-urbanists, the new marketers will be able to pack a thousand domesticated hyperlocal subcultures in every major city, and entirely reprogram it culturally every few months, to sell a new crop of products and services.

That future (either utopian or dystopian, depending on where you stand) is a ways off, but we’ll get there.

Three of the four companies that dominate the Web today: Facebook (Like patterns), Google (search patterns) and Amazon (purchase patterns), are equipped with extremely powerful cultural early-warning radars, based on massive data flows. Data flows so massive that only large institutions within the class-culture matrix will have the power to crunch them into usable intelligence.

Apple, the fourth company, curiously does not have the capacity to lead the zeitgeist this way. Their historic competitive advantage — the mind of Steve Jobs — has turned into a serious weakness with his passing. Because he was preternaturally good at following the zeitgeist, Apple squandered its potential to lead it. A key kind of cultural early-warning radar (based on music tastes) was ceded to startups. It was cheaper to let Jobs stay one step ahead of other gut-driven pre-Internet marketers than to invest in assets that could be exploited by less-talented post-Internet data-driven marketers, capable of staying ahead of culture itself.

This is why Bruce Sterling was right to label Apple an example of Gothic-High-Tech zeitgeist following  rather than zeitgeist leading, but I believe he is wrong in thinking that all marketing is going to be this way; much of it is now going to get ahead of the zeitgeist and actively shape it, within the decade.

As a revealing sign, it is noteworthy that subcultures have already been subverted so completely that they voluntarily self-document their doings online on privately-owned platforms. Every party or group lunch is now likely to be photographed, video-taped and archived online as part of collective memory. Group-life streams and grand narratives are out there, for the reading.

If you’re not paying, you’re the product. Indeed.

But the nitty-gritty aside, the conclusion is inevitable. The subcultural web is now open for colonization. It will retain a potential for very coarse and rough kinds of subversion (#OccupyWallStreet is sort of the Swan Song of subcultural power). This potential will soon peak, and then begin to decline.

The Fortune at the Bottom of the Attention Pyramid

How big is the potential value of subcultural attention mining? The rumored valuation of the Facebook IPO provides a hint: $100 billion. That suggests a market that is big enough — when you consider all players — to move global GDP a few percentage points. Is that a lot or a little? Depends on your frame of reference.

One way to frame the value is to imagine a pyramid of social groupings, representing various levels of social attention (not attention devoted to the non-human world).

At the bottom you have 7 billion little pools of individually-directed attention. At the very top, you have a single point, the group called humanity. There are moments, like 9/11, when all available attention floods to the top.

One organizational rung below, you have perhaps 18 groupings at the coarsest resolution level of the global class-culture matrix: the three basic social classes (rich, middle-class, poor) times the half-dozen or so major civilizations.

Then you have perhaps 700-odd nation-class groupings, and so on down, past cities, kinship groups, traditional family-societies and various other kinds of groupings that were long ago domesticated and subsumed within the class-culture matrix.

At some level of resolution, past a gray transition zone, the class-culture matrix gives way to the untamed subcultural web. The gray zone is moving relentlessly downwards, domesticating the subcultural web and subsuming it within the class-culture matrix.

This is not like the fortune at the bottom of the C. K. Prahalad pyramid. This is the cultural equivalent of the “plenty of room at the bottom” remark by Richard Feynman, which serves as inspiration today for the entire field of nanotechnology.

Except that there isn’t plenty of room. Though the social space occupied by the subcultural web is vast, it is being domesticated so fast that we can expect complete colonization within a decade. Recall what happened with the nineteenth-century railroad boom in America. Settlement processes that had been crawling painfully along for three and a half centuries, suddenly accelerated and finished the job within a few decades (the marker was a major 5-year depression that began in 1873).

So from that perspective, $100 billion seems both reasonable and not particularly large.  It seems like a market that should take no more than a decade  to occupy. At that point, I’d expect Facebook to turn into a mature company with declining margins.

At that point, we will hit the limit I called Peak Attention.  Once all subcultural attention is mined, only two kinds of attention will remain: the attention currently trapped within personal relationships, and the attention controlled by individualist instincts.

Both are likely to be resistant to industrial-scale attention-mining techniques. All genuine subversive instincts will retreat to these lowest two layers of the attention pyramid: groups of size one and two respectively (there are likely around half a trillion one-on-one relationships in the world; I’ll leave you to figure out why).

We will move past Peak Attention, and a new game will begin.

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In the Harry Potter series, J. K. Rowling repeatedly uses a very effective technique: turning a character, initially introduced as part of the background, into a foreground character. This happens with the characters of Gilderoy Lockhart, Viktor Krum and Sirius Black for instance. In fact she uses the technique so frequently (with even minor characters like Mr. Ollivander and Stan Shunpike) that the background starts to empty out.

This is rather annoying because the narrative suggests and promises a very large world — comparable in scope and complexity to the Lord of the Rings world say — but delivers a very small world in which everybody knows everybody. You are promised an epic story about the fate of human civilization, but get what feels like the story of a small town. Characters end up influencing each other’s lives a little too frequently, given the apparent size of the canvas.

We are used to big worlds that act big and small worlds that act small. We are not used to big worlds that act small.

Which is a problem, because that’s the sort of world we now live in. Our world is turning into Rowling’s world.

The Double-Take Zone

Our lives are streams of mostly inconsequential encounters with people who momentarily break away from the nameless and faceless social dark matter that surrounds our personal worlds. But most of the time, they return to the void.

Each of us is at the center of a social reality surrounded by a foreground social zone of 150 odd people with names and faces, a 7-billion strong world of social dark matter outside, and an annular social gray zone in between, comprising a few thousand people.

This last category contains people who are neither completely anonymous and interchangeable, nor possessed of completely unique identities in relation to us.  Included in this annular ring are old classmates and coworkers who still register as unique individuals but have turned into insubstantial ghosts, associated only with a dim memory or two. Also in this ring are public figures and celebrities whom we recognize individually, but who don’t rise above the archetypes that define their respective classes. And then there are all those baristas and receptionists whom you see regularly.

It is this social gray zone that interests me, and there’s a simple test for figuring out if somebody is in this zone with respect to you: if you meet them out of context, you’ll do a double-take.

If the barista at your coffee shop shows up at the grocery store, you’ll do a quick double-take.  Then you’ll make the appropriate context switch, and recognition will turn into identification. Our language accurately reflects this thought process: we say I can’t place her and I just figured out where I know her from. 

This happens with celebrities too. I am pretty good at the game of recognizing lesser-known actors in new roles. When watching TV, I often say things like, “Oh, the villain’s sister in Dexter… I just realized, she played Alma Garrett in Deadwood.” I tend to spot these connections across shows and movies faster than most people.

Context-Dependent Relationships

The reason for the double-take effect is obvious. Most of the people we recognize enough to distinguish from faceless/nameless social dark matter are still one-dimensional, context-dependent figures: the barista who works mornings at the Starbucks on Sahara Avenue. Double-take zone people are literally part of the social background.

It takes a few serendipitous encounters in different contexts to pry someone loose from context, but mostly, nothing happens. They merely turn into slightly more well-defined elements of their default contexts: the barista who works at Starbcucks on Sahara Avenue, that I once ran into at Whole Foods. 

This still isn’t the same as actually knowing someone, but it is a necessary first step (as an aside, this is the reason why the three media/three contacts rule in sales works the way it does). Double-take moments are relationship-escalation options with expiry dates. They create a window of opportunity within which the relationship can escalate into a personal one.

There is a reason haven’t we met before? is the mother of all pick-up lines.

So let’s say there are three zones around you. The context-free zone of personal relationships, surround by a context-dependent double-take zone (call it the don’t-I-know-you-from-somewhere zone if you prefer), and finally, social dark matter.

The Real and Abstract Parts of the Social Graph 

The personal, context-free zone  is the part of the social graph that is real for you. Here, you don’t deal in abstractions like “It’s not what you know, but who you know.” You deal in specifics like, “You need to get yourself a meeting with Joe. Let me send an introductory email.” You could probably sketch out this part of the social graph fairly accurately on paper, with real names and who-knows-whom connections. You don’t need to speculate about degrees of separation here. You can count them.

The dark matter world is the part of the social graph that is an abstraction for you. You have abstract ideas about how it works (Old Boy networks, people taking board seats in each other’s companies, the idea that weak links lead to jobs, the idea that Asians have stronger connections than Americans), but you couldn’t actually sketch it out except in coarse, speculative ways using groups rather than individuals.

The double-take zone is populated by people who are socially part of the abstract social network that defines the dark matter, but physically or digitally are concrete entities in your world, embedded in specific contexts that you frequent. Prying someone loose from the double-take zone means moving them from the abstract social graph into your real, neighborhood graph. They go from being concrete and physically or virtually situated in your mind to being concrete and socially situated, independent of specific contexts. If mathematicians and theoretical computer scientists ran the world, the socially correct thing to say in a double-take situation would be: “Oh, we’re context-independent now; do you want to take this on-graph?”

In these terms, Rowling’s little trick involves introducing characters in the double-take zone and then moving them to the context-free zone. In the process, she socially situates them. Lockhart goes from abstract celebrity author making an appearance at a bookstore to teacher with specific relationships to the lead characters. Sirius Black initially appears as an abstract criminal on television, but turns into Harry’s godfather. Viktor Krum is a distant celebrity Quidditch player who turns into Ron’s rival for the affections of Hermione.

The Active, Unstable Layer

The double-take zone is defined by the double-take test, but such tests are rare. What happens when they do occur? Since an actual double take creates a window of opportunity to personalize a relationship — an active option — you could call this the active and unstable layer of the double-take zone. The more actual double takes are happening, the more the zone is active and unstable.

Our minds deal badly with the double-take zone when it is stable and dormant. And we really fumble when it gets active and unstable. Why?

Our social instincts are based on physical-geographic separation of scales. In the pre-urban world, the double-take zone was empty. You either knew somebody personally as a fellow villager, or as a stranger visiting from the dark-matter world. Strangers couldn’t stay strangers. They either went away soon and were forgotten, or stayed and became fellow villagers.

We are used to being careful around people from our village, and more careless in our dealings with strangers passing through. We take the long view of relationships within local communities, and are more willing to pick fights with strangers. There is less likelihood of costs escalating out of control via vendettas in the latter case. It is also easier. The obvious tourist is more easily cheated than the local.

Our psychological instincts appear to have evolved to deal with this type of social reality. We are more likely (and able) to dehumanize strangers before dealing roughly with them.

Urbanization created the double-take zone. Mass media expanded it vastly, but asymmetrically (mass media creates relationships that are double-take in one direction, dark-matter in the other). The Internet is expanding it vastly once again, this time with more symmetry, thanks to the explosion in number of contexts it offers, for encounters to occur.

This wouldn’t matter so much if the expansion didn’t affect stability. We know how to deal with stable and dormant double-take zones.

The Rules of Civility

Before the Internet began seriously destabilizing and activating the double-take zone, it was an unnatural social space, but we knew how to deal with it.

The double-take zone merely requires learning a decent and polite, but impersonal approach to interpersonal behavior: civility. It requires a capacity for an abstract sort of friendliness and a baseline level of mutual helpfulness among strangers. We learn the non-Duchene smile — something that sits uncomfortably in the middle of a triangle defined by a genuine smile, a genuine frown, and a blank stare.

We think of such baseline civility as the right way to deal with the double-take zone. This is why salespeople come across as insincere: they act as though double-take zone relationships were something deeper.

The pre-Interent double-take zone was fairly stable. Double-take events were truly serendipitous and generally didn’t go anywhere. Most relationship options expired due to low social and geographic mobility. A random encounter was just a random encounter. Travel was stimulating, but poignant encounters abroad rarely turned into anything more.

The rules of conduct that we know as civility have an additional feature: they are based on an assumption of stable, default-context status relationships that carry over to non-default contexts. A century ago, if a double-take moment did occur, once the parties recognized each other (made easier by obvious differences in clothing and other physical markers of class membership), the default-context status relationship would kick in.  If a lord decided to take a walk through the village market on a whim, and ran into his gardener, once the double-take moment passed, the gardener would doff his hat to the lord, and the lord would confer a gracious nod upon the gardener.

But this sort of prescribed, status-dependent civility is no longer enough. The rules of civility cannot deal with an explosion of serendipitous encounters.

Social Mobility versus Status Churn

Since double-take encounters temporarily dislocate people from the default context through which you know them, and make them temporarily more alive after, you could say the double-take zone is coming alive with nascent relationships: relationships that have been dislodged from a fixed physical or digital context, but haven’t yet been socially situated.

There is an additional necessary condition for more to happen: the double-take moment must also destabilize default assumptions about relative status.

Double-take events today destabilize status, unlike similar events a century ago. This is because we read them differently. A lord strolling through a market a century ago — a domain marked for the service class — knew that he was a social tourist. Double-take events, if they happened, were informed by the assumption that one party was an alien to the context, and both sides knew which one was the alien. Everybody wore the uniform of their home class, wherever they went.

Things are different today. A century ago, social classes were much more self-contained. Rich, middle class and poor people didn’t run into each other much outside of expected contexts. They shopped, ate and socialized in different places for instance. This is why traditional romantic stories are nearly always based on the trope of the heroine temporarily escaping from a home social class to a lower one, and having a status-destabilizing encounter with a lower-class male (the reverse, a prince going walkabout and meeting a feisty commoner-girl, seems to be a less common premise, but that’s a whole other story).

But today, one of the effects of the breakdown of the middle class and trading-up is that status relationships become context-dependent. There is no default context.

Let’s say you’re an administrative assistant at a university, have an associate’s degree, and frequent a coffeeshop where the barista is a graduate student. You both shop at Whole Foods. She’s trading up, as far as dietary lifestyles go, to shop at Whole Foods, while it is normal for you because you have a higher household income.

In the coffeeshop, you’re higher status as customer. If you run into each other at Whole Foods, you’re equals. If you run into each other on campus, she’s the superior.

Short of becoming President, there is almost nothing you can do that will earn you a default status with everybody. It’s up in the air.

This isn’t social mobility. The whole idea of social mobility, at least in the sense of classes as separate, self-contained social worlds, is breaking down. Instead you have context-dependent status churn. Double-take moments don’t necessarily indicate that one party is a tourist outside their class. There are merely moments that highlight that class is a shaky construct today.

Worlds are mixing, so double-takes become more frequent. But what makes the increased frequency socially disruptive is that status relationships are different in the different contexts.

Temporal Churn

Even more unprecedented than status churn is temporal churn.

People from the same nominal class, who once knew each other, can move into each other’s double-take zones simply by drifting apart in space. That’s why you do a double-take when you randomly run into an old classmate, whom you haven’t seen for decades, in a bookstore (happened to me once). Or when you run into a hallway-hellos level coworker, whom you’ve never worked directly with, at the grocery store (this happened to me as well).

It is not changes in appearance or social status that make immediate recognition difficult. It is the unfamiliar context itself.

This sort of thing doesn’t happen much anymore. We don’t catch up as much anymore because we never disconnect. Unexpected encounters are rare because online visibility never drops to zero. Truly serendipitous encounters turn into opportunistically planned ones via online early-warning signals.

One effect of this is that relationships can go up or down in strength over a lifetime, since they are continuously unstable and active. Once you’ve friended somebody on Facebook, and their activities keep showing up in your stream, you are more likely to look them up deliberately for a meeting or collaboration. Social situation awareness is not allowed to fade. The active and unstable double-take layer is constantly suggesting opportunities and ideas for deeper interaction.

It’s not that time doesn’t matter anymore, but that time does more complicated things to relationships. In the pre-Internet world, relationships behaved monotonically in the long term. You either lost touch, and the relationship weakened over time, or you stayed in touch and the relationship got stronger over time. Some relationships plateaued at a certain distance.

Few relationships went up and down in dramatic swings as they routinely do today.

Beyond Civility

Mere static-status civility is no longer enough to deal with a world of volatile relationships created by status churn across previously distinct classes, and temporal churn that ensures that relationships that never quite die. Relationships that move in and out of the double-take zone (or even just threaten to do so) need a very different approach.

You never know when you might turn a barista into a new friend after a double-take encounter, or renew a relationship with an old one via a Facebook Like.

The sane default attitude today is  the world is small and life is long. Reinventing yourself is becoming prohibitively expensive.  You have to navigate under the expectation that the real part of your social graph will grow over time, even if you move around a lot. If you are immortal and can move sufficiently fast in space and time, the abstract social graph may vanish altogether, like it did for Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, who made it the mission of his immortal life to insult everybody in the galaxy, in person, by name, and in alphabetical order.

The phrase the world is small and life is long came up in a conversation with an acquaintance in Silicon Valley. We’d been talking about how the Silicon Valley technology world, despite being quite large, acts like a small world. We’d been talking, in particular, about the dangers of burning bridges and picking fights. We both agreed that that’s a very dangerous thing to do. That’s when my acquaintance trotted out that phrase, with a philosophical shrug.

Of the two parts of the phrase, the world is small is easier to understand. I don’t think it has much to do with the much-publicized four-degrees finding on Facebook. Status and temporal churn within the six-degree world is sufficient to explain what’s happening.

Life is long is the bit people often fail to appreciate. The social graph throbs with actual encounters every minute, that are constantly rewiring it. If you are in a particular neck of the woods for a long enough time, you’ll eventually run into everybody within it more than once. It’s the law of large numbers applied to accumulating random encounters.

Silicon Valley is a place where worlds collide frequently in different status-churning contexts, and circulation through different roles over time creates temporal churn. There are other worlds that exhibit similar dynamics. Most of the world is going to look like this in a few decades.

It is increasingly going to be a world of shifting alliances and status relationships within a larger, far more active and unstable layer in a much larger double-take zone. A world where you will never be quite sure where you stand in relation to a large number of potentially important people.

Some people love this emerging, charged social world, always poised on the edge of serendipity. They seem to come alive with this much static in the air.  They thrive on status churn. They hoard relationships, turning every chance encounter into a rest-of-life relationship.

Others fantasize about declaring relationship bankruptcy and starting a new life somewhere else. At one time, this was actually very easy to do. Today, you need the Witness Protection Program to pull it off.

I am not certain whether I like or dislike this emerging world. I think I am leaning towards dislike. The slogan, the world is small and life is long describes a tense and anxious world of constant social shadow-boxing. One where you must always be on, socially. A world where burning bridges is more dangerous, and open conflict becomes ever costlier, leading to less dissent and more stupidity.

It is a situation of false harmony.  One where peace is less an indicator of increasing empathy and human connection, and more  an indicator of increasing wariness. You never know which world your world will collide with next, with what consequences. You never know what missed opportunity or threat could decisively impact your life.

So far, we’ve been able to do without the opportunities, and avoid the threats. We try to teach teenagers what we think are the right kinds of cautious lessons: it boils down to be careful what you post on Facebook, it could affect your job.

But this is a transient stage. Soon we won’t be able to do without the opportunities, and our lives will come to depend on the serendipity catalyzed by the active, unstable double-take layer. Nice-to-have has a way of turning into must-have.  This dependence will come with necessary exposure to the threats. The world is small and life is long will not be enough protection.

Motivational speakers used to preach a few decades back that we should all think global and act local.

It has happened. But I don’t think this is quite what they had in mind.

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Consider this thought experiment: what if you were only allowed 2000 words with which to understand the world?

With these 2000 words, you’d have to do everything. You’d be allowed to occasionally retire some words in favor of others, or invent new words, but you’d have to stick to the budget.

Everything would have to be expressible within the budget: everyday conversations and deep conversations, shallow thoughts and  profound ones, reflections and expectations, scientific propositions and vocational instruction manuals, poetry and stories, emotions and facts.

How would you use your budget? Would you choose more nouns or verbs? How many friends would you elevate to a name-remembered status? How many stars and bird species would you name? Would you have more concrete words or more reified ones in your selection? How many of the most commonly used words would you select? Counting mathematical symbols as words, how many of those would you select? Would you mimic others’ selections or make up your own mind?

***

When I read old texts, I am struck by the density of the writing. Words used to be expensive. You had to make one word do many things.

That last sentence contains a simple example. I originally had convey many meanings in place of do many things. For some readers, the substitution will make no difference. To others, it will make a great deal of difference.

We talk of dense texts as being layered.  They lend themselves to re-reading from many perspectives over a long period of time. Even as late as the nineteenth century, we find that the average professional writer wrote with a density that rivals the densest writing today.  With the exception of scientific writing — best understood as a social-industrial process for increasing the density of words — every other kind of writing today has become less layered. Most writing admits one reading, if that.

Dense writing is not particularly difficult. Merely time-consuming. As the word layering suggests, it is something of a mechanical craft, and you become better with practice. Even mediocre writers in the past, working with starter material no denser than today’s typical Top 10 blog post, could sometimes achieve sublime results by putting in the time.

If the mediocre can become good by pursuing density, the good can become great. Robert Louis Stevenson famously wrote gripping action sequences without using adverbs and adjectives. His prose has a sparse elegance to it, but is nevertheless dense with meaning and drama. I once tried the exercise of avoiding adverbs and adjectives. I discovered that it is not about elimination. The main challenge is to make your nouns and verbs do more work.

***

In teaching and learning writing today, we focus on the isolated virtue of brevity. We do not think about density. Traditions of exegesis — the dilution, usually oral, of dense texts to the point where they are consumable by many — are confined to dead rather than living texts.

We have forgotten how to teach density. In fact, we’ve even forgotten how to think  about it. We confuse density with overwrought, baroque textures, with a hard-to-handle literary style that can easily turn into tasteless excess in unskilled hands.

The 2000-word thought experiment, if you try it, will likely force you to consider density of meaning as a selection factor. Some words, like schadenfreude, are intrinsically dense. Others, like love, are dense because they are highly adaptable.  Depending on context, they can do many things.

Density is a more fundamental variable than the length of a text. It is intrinsic to writing, like the density of a fluid; what is known in fluid dynamics as an intensive property. The length of an arbitrarily delineated piece of text on the other hand, is an extensive property, like the volume of a specified container of fluid.

Choosing words precisely and crafting dense sentences is important. Choosing small containers is not.

***

Writing used to be a form of making. I sometimes wonder what it would be like to have to carve your thoughts onto stone tablets.  One of these days I am going to try carving the first draft of a post in stone.

Writing on paper is also an expensive luxury. There was a time when writers made their own paper and ink. You had to write with temperamental things like quills. The practice of calligraphy was not a writerly affectation. It was a necessary skill in the days of temperamental media.

The scribe was more of an archivist than a writer. The other ancestor of the writer, the bard-sage, was both composer and performer. The average person did not read, but relied on the bard or priest to expand upon and perform the written, archived word. Particularly good performances would lead to revisions of the written texts.

When fountain pens and cheap factory-made paper made their appearance, writers were able to waste paper, and as a consequence, written words. In the history of thought, the invention of the ability to waste words was probably as important as the invention of the ability — famously noted by Alan Kay — to waste bits in the history of programming.

With cheap paper was born that iconic image of the twentieth century writer — a writer sitting alone in a room, crumpling up a piece of writing in frustration, and tossing it into an overflowing waste-paper basket. Unlike the sage-bard, enacting old texts and beta-testing new ones through public oral performances, or the scribe, committing tested, quality-controlled and expensive texts to stone, the modern, pre-Internet writer was a resource-rich creature of profligate excess. 

The very idea of a “waste paper” basket would have been unthinkable at one time.

***

It is difficult today to get a sense of how expensive writing used to be. I once watched a traditional temple scribe demonstrate the process of making the palm-leaf manuscripts that were used in India until Islam brought paper-making to the subcontinent. That probably happened a few centuries after the Abbasids defeated the Tang empire at the Battle of Talas in 751 AD, and extracted the secret of paper-making from Chinese prisoners of war.

Palm leaves are easily the worst writing technology ever invented by a major culture. They make leather, papyrus, paper and silk look like space-age media by comparison. A good deal that seems strange about India as an idea suddenly makes sense once you get that the civilization was being enacted through this ridiculous medium (and equally ridiculous ones like tree bark) until about 1000 AD. Imagine a modern civilization that had to keep its grand narrative going using only tweets, and you get some sense of what was going on.

Here’s how you make palm-leaf manuscripts. First you cut little index-card sized rectangles out of palm fronds and dry them flat. Then you carefully use a needle to scratch out the text — typically a few lines per leaf.  Then you make an ink out of ground charcoal, carefully rub it into the scratches, and swab away the excess. Finally, you carefully pierce a hole through the middle (not the edge, since the thing is brittle) and thread a piece of string through a sheaf of loosely-related leaves.

Congratulations, you have a book.

Since the sheaf is more unstable than individual leaves, you have to plan for graceful degradation. Expect individual leaves to be lost or damaged. Expect accidental shuffling and page numbering turning to garbage. Expect new leaves to be inserted, like viruses. Don’t expect multi-leaf stories to remain stable. Expect narrative trunks to sprout branches added by later authors.

The palm leaf manuscript was brittle and easily damaged, available in one unhelpful size, with a lifespan of perhaps a few decades on average (carefully preserved ones lasted around 150 years I believe). After that you had to make a copy if you wanted to keep the ideas alive. If you were rich or powerful, you could get stuff carved onto stone or copper plates by slaves. If not, your best bet was to go with palm leaves and hope that people would descend on your home to make copies.

***

When you look at old writing technology, poetry suddenly makes sense.

It is  modular content that comes in fixed-length chunks, with redundancy and error-correcting codes built in. It is designed to be transmitted and copied across time and space through unreliable and noisy channels, one stone tablet, palm leaf or piece of handmade paper at a time. The technology was still unreliable enough that the oral tradition remained the primary channel. Writing began as a medium for backups. Scribes were the first data warehousing experts. They did more than merely transcribe the spoken word. They compressed, corrected and encrypted as well, and periodically updated texts to reflect the extant state of the oral tradition.

That is why verses are so eminently quotable outside the context of poems. Poems are extensive oral containers of arbitrary length, in some cases delineated after the fact. Verses are standardized containers designed to carry intense, dense, archival-quality words around.

Today we view traditional verse epics as single works. The Illiad has about 9000 verses. The Mahabharata has about 24,000. It makes far more sense to talk about both as data-warehoused records of extremely long — in both time and words — convergent conversations. They are closer to Google’s index than to books.

For the ancients, texts had to be little metered packets. But as paper technology got cheaper and more reliable, poetry, like many other obsolete technologies before and after, turned into an art form. Critical function turned into dispensable style. Meter and rhyme ceased to be useful as error-correcting coding mechanisms and turned into free dimensions for artistic expression.

Soon, individual verses could be composed under the assumption of stable, longer embedding contexts. Extensive works could be delineated  a priori, during the composition of the parts. And the parts could be safely de-containerized. Rhyming verse could be abandoned in favor of blank verse, and eventually meter became entirely unnecessary. And we ended up with the bound book of prose.

Technologically, it was something of a backward step, like reverting to circuit-switched networks after having invented packet switching, or moving back from digital to analog technology. But it served an important purpose: allowing the individual writer to emerge. The book could belong to an individual author in a way a verse from an oral tradition could not.

***

Poetry gets it right: length is irrelevant. You can standardize and normalize it away using appropriate containerization. It is density that matters. Evolving your packet size and vocabulary over time helps you increase density over time.

My posts range between 2000-5000 words, and I post about once a week here on ribbonfarm. But there are many bloggers who post two or three 300-word posts a day, five days a week. They also log 2000-5000 words.

So I am not particularly prolific. I merely have a different packet size compared to other bloggers, optimized for a peculiar purpose: evolving an idiosyncratic vocabulary. It seems to take several thousand words to characterize a neologism like gollumize or posturetalk.  But once that is done, I can reuse it as a compact and dense piece of refactored perception.

You could say that what I am really trying to do on this blog is compose a speculative dictionary of dense words and phrases. Perhaps one day this blog will collapse under its own gravity into a single super-dense post written entirely with 2000 hyperlinked neologisms, like a neutron star.

Poetry — functional ancient poetry, the cultural TCP/IP of the world before around 1000 AD — is necessarily a social process, involving, at the very least, a sage-bard, a scribe, an audience and a patron. The oral culture refines, distills, tests, reworks, debates and judges. Iterative performance is a necessary component. When oral exegesis of an unstable verse dies down, and memorization and repetition validate the quality of the finished verse, the scribe breaks out his chisel.

The prose book can stand apart from broader social processes in radically individual ways. It can travel from writer to readers largely unaltered, setting up a hub-spoke pattern of conversational circuits.

***

I’ve occasionally described my blogging as a sort of performance art. But something about that self-description has been bothering me. I have now concluded that if the description applies at all, it applies to a different kind of blogger, not me.

The Web obscures the crucial and necessary distinction between oral and written cultures.  Some bloggers perform and talk. Others are scribes. I think I am a scribe, not a performer.

Yet, there is no easy correspondence between pre-Gutenberg bard-sages and scribes and today’s bloggers. In the intervening centuries, we have seen the rise and fall of the individualist writer, working alone, filling waste-paper baskets.

History does not rewind. It synthesizes. The blogosphere, I am convinced, synthesizes the collectivist pre-Gutenberg culture of sage-bard and scribes with the individualist post-Gutenberg culture of paper-crumpling waste-paper-basket fillers.

In the process of synthesis, virtual circuits must ride once more on top of a revitalized packet-switched network. The oral/written distinction must be replaced by a more basic one that is medium-agnostic, like the Internet itself.

***

According to legend, the sage Vyasa needed a scribe to write down the Mahabharata as he composed it. Ganesha accepted the challenge, but demanded that the sage compose as fast as he could write. Wary of the trickster god, Vyasa in turn set his own condition: Ganesha would have to understand every verse before writing it down. And so, the legend continues, they began, with Vyasa throwing curveball verses at Ganesha whenever he needed a break.

The figure of Vyasa the composer is best understood as a literary device to represent a personified oral tradition (that perhaps included a single real Vyasa or family of Vyasas).

But the legend gets at something interesting about the role of a scribe in a dominantly oral culture. A second-class citizen like a minute-taker or official record-keeper, the scribe must nevertheless synthesize and interpret an ongoing cacophony in order to produce something coherent to write down. When the spoken word is cheap and the written word is expensive, the scribe must add value. The oral tradition may be the default, but the written one is the court of final appeal in case of conflict among two authoritative individuals.

There is a brilliant passage in Yes, Prime Minister, where the Cabinet Secretary Humphery Appleby  helps the Prime Minister, Jim Hacker, cook the minutes of a cabinet meeting after the fact, to escape from an informal oral commitment. Appleby’s exposition of the principle of accepting the minutes as the de facto official memory gets to the heart of the Vyasa-Ganesha legend:

Sir Humphrey: “It is characteristic of all committee discussions and decisions that every member has a vivid recollection of them and that every member’s recollection of them differs violently from every other member’s recollection. Consequently, we accept the convention that the official decisions are those and only those which have been officially recorded in the minutes by the Officials, from which it emerges with an elegant inevitability that any decision which has been officially reached will have been officially recorded in the minutes by the Officials and any decision which is not recorded in the minutes is not been officially reached even if one or more members believe they can recollect it, so in this particular case, if the decision had been officially reached it would have been officially recorded in the minutes by the Officials. And it isn’t so it wasn’t.”

The key point here is that the scribe must do more than merely transcribe. He must interpret and synthesize. I suspect the Vyasa-Ganesha legend was invented by the first scribe paid to write down the hitherto-oral Mahabharata, to legitimize his own interpretative authority in capturing something coherent from a many-voiced tradition, with each voice claiming the authority of a mythical Vyasa.

***

So if the modern blogosphere is neither the collectivist, negotiated recording of a Grand Narrative, arrived at via a conversation between scribes and sage-bards, nor the culture of purely individual expression that reigned between Gutenberg and Tim Berners-Lee, what is it?

For blogging to be performance art, the performer must live an interesting life and do interesting things. For a while I thought I qualified, but then I reflected and was forced to admit that my dull daily routine does not qualify as raw material for performance art.

How about this: instead of a half-coherent oral tradition or the relatively coordinated doings of the British Cabinet, the blogosphere is primarily an uncoordinated theater of large-scale individual gonzo blogging. As culture is increasingly enacted by this theater of decentered gonzo blogging instead of traditions that enjoy received authority, minute-taking scribe bloggers must increasingly interpret what they are seeing.

The first human scribe who wore the mask of Ganesha could reasonably assume that there was a coherent trunk narrative with discriminating judgments required only at the periphery.  He would only be responsible for smoothing out the rough edges of an evolving oral consensus. Equally Humphrey Appleby could hope for a coherent emergent intentionality in the deliberations of the cabinet.

But the scribe-blogger cannot assume that there is anything coherent to be discovered in the gonzo blogging theater. At best he can attempt to collect and compress and hope that it does not all cancel out.

There is another difference. When words are literally expensive, as words carved in stone are, anything written has de facto authority, underwritten by the wealth that paid for the scribe. Scribes were usually establishment figures associated with courts, temples or monasteries, deriving their interpretative authority from more fundamental kinds of authority based on violence or wealth.

With derived authority comes supervision. The compensation for lost derived authority is the withdrawal of supervision.  The scribe-blogger is an unsupervised and unauthorized chronicler in a world of contending gonzos. Any authority he or she achieves is a function of the density and coherence of the interpretative perspective it offers on the gonzo-blogging theater.

***

I wish I could teach dense blogging. I am not sure how I am gradually acquiring this skill, but I am convinced it is not a difficult one to pick up. It requires no particular talent beyond a generic talent for writing and thinking clearly. It is merely time-consuming and somewhat tedious.

Sometimes I strive for higher density consciously, and at other times, dense prose flows out naturally after a gonzo-blogger memeplex has simmered for a while in my head. I rarely let non-dense writing out the door. You need gonzo-blogging credibility to successfully do Top 10 list posts. I can manufacture branded ideas, but lack the raw material needed to sustain a personal brand.

Writing teachers with a doctrinaire belief in brevity urge students to focus. They encourage selection and elimination in the service of explicit intentions.  The result is highly legible writing. Every word serves a singular function. Every paragraph contains one idea. Every piece of prose follows one sequence of thoughts. There is a beginning, a middle and an end. Like a city laid out by a High-Modernist architect, the result is anemic. The text takes a single prototypical reader to a predictable conclusion. In theory. More often, it loses the reader immediately, since no real reader is anything like the prototypical one assumed by (say) the writer of a press release.

An insistence on focus turns writing into a vocational trade rather than a liberal art.

Both gonzo blogging and scribe blogging lead you away from the writing teacher.

Striving for density, attempting to compress more into the same number of words, inevitably leads you away from the legibility prized by writing teachers. Ambiguity, suggestion and allusion become paramount. Coded references become necessary, to avoid burdening all readers with selection and filtration problems. Like Humpty-Dumpty, you are sometimes forced to enslave words and chain them to meanings that they were not born with.

***

Dense writing creates illegible slums of meaning. To the vocational writer, it looks discursive, messy and randomly exploratory.

But what the vocational writer mistakes for a lack of clear intention is actually a multiplicity of intentions, both conscious and unconscious.

Francine Prose, in Reading Like a Writer, remarked that beginning novelists obsess about voice, the question of who is speaking. She goes on to remark that the more important question is who is listening?

The failure to ask who is listening is peculiar to pre-Internet book writers. You cannot possibly fail that way as a blogger.

The modern extensive-prose, word-wasteful book represents the apogee of a certain kind of individualism. An individualism that writes itself into existence through self-expression unmodulated by in-process feedback, something only entire cultures could afford to do in the age of stone-carved words. For this kind of writer, the reader was a distant abstraction, easily forgotten.

A muse was an optional aid to the process rather than a necessary piece of cognitive equipment. At most modern, pre-blogging book writers wrote for a single archetypal reader.

For the blogger, a multiplicity of readerly intentions is a given. At the very least, you must constantly balance the needs of the new reader against the needs of the long-time reader. Every frequent commenter or email/IM correspondent becomes an unavoidable muse. This post for instance, was triggered by a particularly demanding muse who accused me, over IM, of having gotten lazy over the last few posts and neglecting this blog in favor of my more commercial, less-dense writing.

She was right. Mea culpa. Having to pay the rent is not a valid excuse for failing to rise to the challenge of a tricky balancing act.

Density is the natural consequence of trying to say many things to many distinct people over long periods of time without repeating yourself too much or sparking flame wars. The long-time reader gets impatient with repetition and demands compaction of old ideas into a shorthand that can be built upon. The newcomer demands a courteous, non-cryptic welcome. Active commenters demand a certain kind of room for their own expansion, elaboration and meaning construction.

The exegesis of living texts is not the respectful affair that it is around dead ones. If you blog, there will be blood.

***

In the days of 64k memories, programmers wrote code with as much care as ancient scribes carved out verses on precious pieces of rock, one expensive chisel-pounding rep at a time.

In the remarkably short space of 50 years, programming has evolved from rock-carving parsimony to paper-wasting profligacy.

Still living machine-coding gray eminences bemoan the verbosity and empty abstractions of the young. My one experience of writing raw machine code (some stepper-motor code, keyed directly into a controller board,  for a mechatronics class) was enlightening, but immediately convinced me to run away as fast as I could.

But why shouldn’t you waste bits or paper when you can, in service of clarity and accessibility? Why layer meaning upon meaning until you get to near-impenetrable opacity?

I think it is because the process of compression is actually the process of validation and comprehension.  When you ask repeatedly, who is listening, every answer generates a new set of conflicts. The more you resolve those conflicts before hitting Publish, the denser the writing. If you judge the release density right, you will produce a very generative piece of text that catalyzes further exploration rather than ugly flame wars.

Sometimes, I judge correctly. Other times I release too early or too late. And of course, sometimes a quantity of gonzo-blogger theater compresses down to nothing and I have to throw away a draft.

And some days, I find myself staring at a set of dense thoughts that refuse to either cohere into a longer piece or dissolve into noise. So I packetize them into virtual palm-leaf index cards delimited by asterixes, and let them loose for other scribes to shuffle through and perhaps sinter into a denser mass in a better furnace.

It is something of a lazy technique, ultimately no better than list-blogging in the gonzo blogosphere. But if it was good enough for Wittgenstein, it’s good enough for me.

***

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The last time I froze and posted my short-term reading list on August 12, people seemed to appreciate it. Going by my Amazon Affiliate data and random conversations with some of you on Google+ and Facebook, it looks like at least a few dozen people bought one or more of the books and read along, in a sort of invisible de facto book club. So I figured I’d make it a routine feature.

I personally finished 6.75 of the 8 books I posted (one book got swapped out for an alternate) by December 31. That’s a reading rate of just under a book every 3 weeks. Which means I should be able to get through about 8.7 books by the end of June.

Here’s my book list that I plan to get through by June 30, beyond the backlog of  1.25, which leaves me with an allowance of 7.45. I’ll round that up to 8. Here’s the list.

1. Notes on the Synthesis of Form: A seminal book on design, recommended by Dorian Taylor and Xianhang Zhang.
2. Cognition in the Wild: Another seminal book on decision-making in real-world settings, also recommended by Dorian Taylor
3. Shop Class as Soul Craft: A book on the philosophy of making stuff, and the value of working with your hands. Recommended by Art Felgate, Daniel Lemire and a couple of other people.
4. Invisible Giant: Cargill and its Transnational Strategies OR Merchants of Grain: The Power and Profits of the Five Giant Companies at the Center of the World’s Food Supply (haven’t picked yet): Books on the global food industry, recommended by Megan Lubaszska.
5. The Battery: How Portable Power Sparked a Technological Revolution: From my own list.
6. Why Beauty is Truth: the history of symmetry: From my unread pile.
7. Design in Nature: how the constructal law governs evolution in biology, physics, technology and social organization: bit of a wildcard, due to be released January 24th. Recommended by John Hagel.
8. Infrastructure: a field guide to the industrial landscape: a recommendation off Quora. Seems like fun mind-candy, targeted more at the “How Things Work” kids’ market than adults, but still…

Infrastructure and Making

Two themes seem to pop out here: infrastructure and making.

My exploration of the world of infrastructure, which has been going on casually for a couple of years (I’ve written quite a bit about things like shipping and garbage) is heading into a mature drill-down-and-integrate phase. It seems increasingly likely that my next book will be related to this stuff in some way.

If that theme is maturing and getting serious, a new theme is taking root: design, building stuff, making things. What people are calling the Maker Revolution. I see some red flags of save-the-world cultishness here, but it seems like a good time to think about the subject. Two readers, Nick Pinkston and Justin Mares, who are just coming off their Cloudfab project, have been energetically trying to persuade me (and apparently everybody else they talk to) to take this theme seriously.

If nothing else, I’ll learn enough to poke fun at the solemn save-the-world makers.

Do You Want a Forum?

On and off over the years, people have asked for a ribbonfarm discussion forum. I’ve been reluctant to set one up, since it would be more maintenance work, but now that WordPress has some strong support for the feature, it’s gotten easier.

The face-to-face field trip events last year, Google+ and Facebook have been good for small and informal sidebar conversations with some of you, but there’s something to be said for a less cluttered space for conversations that are not explicitly linked to a blog post, and accessible to all.

If I do this, it will be free, but I may do some light-touch gatekeeping so administration doesn’t take over my life.

If you are interested, let me know by email or post a comment, along with any suggestions. If there’s enough interest (at least a couple of dozen people), I’ll set one up.

Turning this de facto invisible book club into a de jure visible one seems to be a good first use case for a forum.

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Here we go.

The Numbers

It was a bit of a slump year in terms of number of posts. I had 35 posts, where I had 47 posts in 2010, 59 in 2009, 93 in 2008 and 50 in 2007 (which was a half year, since I started in July).

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