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wisdom of clouds III

The thesis: the world is cloudier

proposition 1: there are more people, objects and ideas

subproposition 1.3  there are more ideas

There are more ideas?  What a ludicrous proposition. 

For one thing, it’s impossible to test. Actually, it’s impossible to think. What is an idea? What’s an idea part, what’s an idea whole? How many “ideas” exist in Pirates of the Caribbean? How many ideas are there in the average email or telephone conversation? How would we count them even if we could identity them. It’s a completely jello-y problem, fraught with difficulty, and several times on the train back from Cambridge, I found myself thinking, "it's a very bad idea to say that there are more ideas.How would we know?”

Intuitively, the idea holds some appeal. There appears to be absolutely and proportionally more art, music and film in the world. Books continue grow in number. The corporation is now committed to innovation as Job 1 and this makes it a fountain of ideation.  The internet is yet another fountain. Intuitively, it looks like there are more ideas. I found one hard number, and it was encouraging. International copyright applications from developing countries rose from 680 in 1997 to 5,359 in 2002.

Let’s begin. (I must ask the philosophically squeamish to look away. I would like to think that what follows is rough carpentry, crudely executed but not ill formed. But I know that no one with philosophical training will share this opinion.) Let’s begin by saying that by “idea” we mean an assertion that posits something technically intelligible and socially admissible. So, “Green ideas sleep sleep” fails the first test. “Green ideas sleep furiously” satisfies the first test (it’s intelligible) but fails the second (it’s not admissible). “Boston is wasted on the Bostonians” satisfied both. We might not “see” what it means but we recognize it as an assertion on which further scrutiny would probably not be wasted. (I realize my idea of “idea” begs many questions, but bear with me.)

It is not unusual for someone on the blogosphere to tell us “my car wouldn’t start this morning.” This is technically intelligible, socially admissible, but trivial. It might be true. It might be false. We don’t care. So by “idea” we mean an assertion that posits something technically intelligible, social admissible, and provocative of an interest in contestation. By this definition, “Raiders suck,” “Lost is a good TV show,” or “Dennis Kucinich is wrong for president,” are all ideas we care about.

Actually, we are looking not for any contestation; we are looking for rich contestation. “Raiders suck” invites “Forty-niners suck” (or “Bite me”) and that’s the end of the “conversation.” “Dennis Kucinich is wrong for president” can be answered with “bite me” but something more thoughtful is not inappropriate. Indeed, the relatively mild tone of the assertion calls for something more thoughtful. I’m not saying “Raiders suck” is not an idea. I am saying “Dennis Kucinich is wrong for president” is, for our purposes, more idea-ish. Ideas that invite detailed explication and rebuttal so qualify.

There’s one last condition. (Thank you for bearing with me this far. You qualify for hardship, if not danger, pay. Mrs. Burton will give you a voucher as you leave.) Ideas can be provocative without being illuminating. Chances are, ideas that merely provoke a reaction are more likely to confirm old ideas than introduce us to new ones.

Anna Nicole Smith embodied America. She embodied its bounty as well as its overabundance; its exploitability, and its propensity to exploit. She embodied, also, its litigiousness, its enterprise, its universal offer of the chance to remake oneself (Gatsby did it one way, Anna Nicole Smith did it another).

This is Tunku Varadarajan suggesting that some of the properties of a celebrity might be thought of as properties of the U.S. This is illuminating because it helps me see something I could not otherwise see: that Smith’s tragedy is an American story or that America is in some respects Smith-ish. (I understand that that this idea is strictly speaking a metaphor, an idea expressly designed to be illuminating. I mean to include also statements of fact, things like “the average American house went from 1,660 square feet in 1973 to 2,400 square feet in 2004” which illuminates both culture and commerce.)

Ok, so, by “idea” we mean an assertion that posits something technically intelligible, social admissible, provocative of an interest in contestation, and possessed of real candle power (illumination).  Again, I know I've made lots of perilous assumptions, but, hey, as long as it gets us over the ravine of ignorance, even a rickety bridge will do.  (I will ask readers to move in single file.  And, Steve, no swaying!) 

Ok, now we have an idea of what we mean in this case  by "idea."  But can we say there are more of these ideas?   A sensible man would go forth and begin counting "ideas" in public discourse.  But I am not a sensible man.  I am an anthropologist.  We do things the hard way.  In the famous words of Animal House and Ghost Busters, when the world needs a futile gesture, we're the ones you call.  (Note to self: update movie references.)

I think we can know that there are more ideas without counting them because we know something about the nature of discourse on the internet.  We know that the act of blogging (to take merely one of the new idea fountains) requires that the blogger articulate what is probably otherwise inchoate.  To commit something to a blog, we are required to think it through to a new state of explicitness.  Here, before the idea has actually hit the airwaves, it is more idea-ish than it was before, even it is not quite sufficiently idea-ish to meet our definition.  But it is more explicit and this invites contestation, which is to say, our clear idea forces new clarity in the minds of the reader.  Acts of contestation, the back and forth of debate, idea-ates the ideas even more, not just for the participants but for lookers on. 

The world before and after the internet is a little like America before and after urbanization.  If I am a farmer working the fields, chances are the ideas in my head inchoate and not very idea-ish.  It's only when I sit down to dinner with my family, or go to the diner in town, that there is even opportunity for articulation or contestation.  And chances are these domains, family and diner, are filled with people sufficiently like me that I am rarely required to roll my arguments out in very much detail.  (In the phrase of yesterday's post, for my great great Scottish grandfather, "ay, football" spoke volumes and may well have exhausted the conversational work of an evening.)

It is when I move to the city, and find myself surrounded by lots of strange strangers, that I feel a new necessity to think out what I believe.  And when called upon to present these ideas to strangers, I am obliged to unearth and to state the assumptions on which they, the ideas, rest.  This rarely happened in the field or the diner.  And unearthing assumptions means that I can now see what I think in a way I never did before.  Now my ideas are more idea-ish and more likely to become new, different and more ideas in my head.  Once exposed to public scrutiny where they are likely to renew their generative effects in the heads of other people, as their responses will in mine. 

The internet is a new urbanization.  It changes what we think and multiplies the ideas with which we think.  Come to that the internet actually makes for a globalization.  Ready access to sites like Wikipedia and about.com allow us to deepen our understanding of any one of idea and to cast the net in search of new ideas.  Even as we become ever more urban, I can be more global, traversing intellectual continents, sailing opinion seas that would otherwise have taken more substantial investments of time and energy.  The internet makes me a citizen of worlds outside my own, and this too must multiply the ideas at my disposal.  At the very least, it will renew the urbanization effect by which I am exposed to more difference and obliged to offer more explicitness.  Access to people and difference of opinion forces me to be more explicit.  Access to more intellectual resources empowers my internal hedgehog to cultivate what I do know and it empowers my internal fox to find out things I don't know, in both cases multiplying the ideas I call my own.  (Mrs. Burton has cold compresses for anyone who is suffering the effects of runaway metaphor, urban hedgehogs and global foxes, and all that.)

This is an unduly complicated way of making the argument that there are more ideas, and Mrs. Burton is deeply sorry.  But we are now, perhaps, in a position to reflect on new ideas as a cause of the cloudiness of the contemporary world.  More ideas create more ideas.  But more ideas also create new techniques of idea management.  We have to get better at pattern recognition, and this take ability to jump assumptions with new agility.  In a modernist time, I guess we thought that the intellectual world might look like Fuller's geodesic dome, ideas fitting together harmoniously, each bearing the weight of others, a keystone principle used not once, but over and over again. 

But that's not what our intellectual world looks like at all.  It is much more like an great house from the Elizabethan period, a structure with medieval origins that has been added to and reworked often since.  This metaphor captures the rambling, run-on quality of our intellectual worlds, but not the fact that the physics actually changed from wing to wing and room to room.  To entertain some ideas, we must posit one set of assumptions.  But to entertain another set of ideas, we must abandon the first set and embrace an entirely different set.  Simply to think about Microsoft as a corporate culture I must "configure my head" with one set of assumptions.  To think about Apple, I must use another.  And both of these creatures occupy a world that is constrained by the rules of commerce.  When it comes to cultural creatures, (the music of the 1960s vs. the music of the 1990s, say) the space between assumption sets can be much larger.   

But of course there is a simpler way to make this argument.  Forget intellectual adventuring. Merely to think well about the internet takes a lot of assumption jumping.  Each of the innovations now in place (email, websites, search engines, social networks, internet appliance, virtual worlds), the first time we heard of them we were obliged to struggle.  What is this?  What do we need to think to grasp it?  What assumptions does it challenge?  What new assumptions does it require?  How does this new understanding fit with the other things we think we know?  Perhaps it changes much of what we think we know...if only we could see how.

We have more ideas, with more space between them, and we cannot accommodate these ideas, let alone think them, unless we are prepared to treat with, engage in, endure, and if such a thing is possible, cultivate cloudiness in new ways. 

Summing up the last three posts, then, cloudiness comes from the fact that we now have more people, more objects, and more ideas.  Comes from and responds to.  If cloudiness is the new structure of the contemporary world, it is also perhaps a good way to respond to same, if only we understood it better. 

References for this post (and the last two)

Anonymous.  2007. China’s GDP grows 10.7 percent in 2006.  People’s Daily Online. here.   

Berlin, Isaiah.  1953.  The Hedgehog and the Fox.  Chicago: Ivan R. Dee.

Ehrlich, Paul.  1968.  The Population Bomb. here. 

Granovetter, Mark. 1973. The Strength of Weak Ties.  American Journal of Sociology. Vol. 78.  Issue 6. May 1360-80.

Kelly, Kevin.  Help Wanted: How many objects. here. 

Surowiecki, James.  2004.  The Wisdom of Crowds.  New York:

Vanderbilt, Tom.  2005.  Self-Storage Nation.  Americans are storing more stuff than ever.  Slate. July 18, 2005. here. 

Varadarajan, Tunku. 2007. Anna Nicole Smith. Wall Street Journal. February 13, 2007. (with a hat tip to the Arts and Letters Daily here for the find)

Withers, Rachel.  2001.  Michael Landy: Break Down.  ArtForum.  May 2001. see the abstract here. 

FedEx package count is here. 

The eBay count comes from adding up the categories on the eBay overview here. 
(Thanks to Adam Dresner for the idea.  See his comment on Kelly’s post.)

The Wal-Mart sku count is here. 

The “grocery store” sku count for 1974 and 1997 is from the 25^th Anniversary Review of U.P.C. Impact.  All other stats from the very interesting article by Vanderbilt in Slate.

wisdom of clouds II

The thesis: the world is cloudier

proposition 1:
there are more people, objects, and ideas

yesterday:
subproposition 1.1: more people

today:
subproposition 1.2: more objects

Are there more objects in the world? Susan, a respondent of mine, took me to the verge of her family’s garage.  We stood there for a moment, contemplating the blizzard within: two aluminum ladders, a plastic Halloween jack o’ lantern, a series of nested woks, a whole slew of wicker baskets, a backup toaster, bags of kitty litter, folding chairs, shoe trees, paint cans, an ancient personal computer, a fencing helmet, several gardening trowels, a fondue pot, cardboard boxes, a basketball backboard, a pick nick hamper, paper towels in a Costco multipack, hockey sticks, lobster pots, a toboggan, and lots of transparent plastic boxes.  There is room for everything here except the cars which now sit in the driveway.  Susan made a funny sound in her throat. She seemed both happy and horrified.  “Welcome to my world,” she chuckled.

There’s a reason for all this stuff.  According to Morgan Stanley, the real cost of consumer goods went down, and spending, in the period 1996 to 2004, went up, increasing 4% a year.  Plus, Americans had steadily more to buy.  In 1974, the average grocery store had 9,000 kinds of goods (or “sku,” stock keeping unit). Twenty years later, this figure had grown to 30,000 skus.  These days the typical Wal-Mart Supercenter has 100,000 skus.  All those choices, all those factories in Cheng Du and Guangdong running day and night, all that Wal-Mart cost cutting, it ended up having an effect on Susan’s garage.  Well, and not just on her garage. The average American house went from 1,660 square feet in 1973 to 2,400 square feet in 2004. (Susan recently added 750 square feet.)  The expansion of the house happened during a contraction of the family. Homes got larger in part to make room for more stuff.

It is very hard to say how many discrete consumer objects there are in the U.S. at the moment, and even harder to know how many exist in the lives of any given American. Though, when the English artist, Michael Landry, decided to destroy his worldly possessions, strictly in the name of art, you understand, it took his team 2 full weeks.  It turned out that Mr. Landry owned over 7,000 things.  By this unreliable metric, there are now some 2,108,408,113,000 consumer-owned objects in the U.S. But even if we run this calculation at half-Landry (3,500 things), we would be a nation of 1,054,211,392,500 objects.  I feel certain there are this many things in Susan’s garage alone.

But we might get some sense of this universe by noting the disposition of objects outside the home.  FedEx makes 6 million shipments every day.  Self storage facilities amount to1,875 billion square feet in 40,000 facilities.  On Sunday, February 18, there were 15,502,667 things for sale on eBay alone.  (It would be grand if we had a figure for the entire American retail shelf.)  Objects in transit, objects in storage, objects for sale, the number of objects outside the home is fantastically large. One to two trillion.

What does this figure look like for the world outside the U.S.?  It is proportionally smaller to be sure.  But rising disposable incomes in countries like China and India must mean that the absolute number of consumer owned objects in the world is very, very large, and that it is now growing by leaps and bounds.

When numbers of this kind are usually contemplated, it is to show a) that Americans are using more than our share of natural resources, or b) that we live in a world with too much choice.  I expect the former is true and the latter is, well, both tedious and, from an anthropological and an economic point of view, irrelevant

We could paint Susan as a ravening monster, eating her way through the planet.  But that garage of hers may also be seen as a strategic resource with which she runs and serves her family.  My mother's idea of preparing her 8 year old (me) for summer was to buy a bag of "runners."  These were Converse-like athletic shoes, made in Hong Kong, and sold by weight on the west coast of Canada in the 1960s.  I think there were 10 pairs to a bag and the question was always which would end first, the bag or the summer.  The bag usually won.  (But not always, which gave my mother the opportunity to say, "you've run out of runners.")

But Susan has a somewhat more sophisticated approach to provisioning her family.  She's got kids in Karate camp.  She got kids who are interested in fencing.  She's got a husband with several, sometimes fleeting enthusiasms.  She's got a family that likes to stage amateur theatricals.  Susan is a bit like a supply sergeant and her family an enterprise that needs constant and complicated logistical enablement.  Actually, if we talk to Susan (instead of merely damning her from the ramparts of the ivory tower), she will tell us that it is up to her to stage any one of several activities at a moment's notice.  This family is not just diverse and it is not just complicated.  It is extremely mobile, one might even say  capricious.  It can change it's mind at the drop of a hat, and when this happens Mom must be ready. 

In sum, this is a cloudy family.  There may have been a time when athletics turned on baseball, rituals turned on Thanksgiving, a cuisine of monolithic choices supplied mostly by Kraft, and children could be equipped with "runners" and little else.  But those days have passed.  There are 4 other people in Susan's family.  Each of them is very much a work in progress.  Susan, as parent, might once have served as the writer and the director of these lives.  Now, she is something more like a producer.  She serves their complexity, their cloudiness by acknowledging their complexity and cloudiness. 

What's true for Susan is, I'm guessing, true for most of the rest of us.  Our "object worlds" are dense with things that reflect and enable our cloudiness.  Does it take 7,000 objects to equip our cloudiness?  Would staging personhood at half that number (at half-Landry tolerances) make us more cloudy or less?  We can at least say this.  Those bulging garages are perhaps less a symptom than a signature. 

References

forthcoming

Apologies

Yesterday's post was, in the words of one reader, "dorked up" by some readers and aggregators.  Am working on the problem now. 

tomorrow: subproposition 1.3 more ideas

The wisdom of clouds

I rattled back to Connecticut from MIT on the train, struggling to think some more about the cloudiness notion.  

Here’s what I came up with as a first proposition. (There are three altogether. Watch this space.)

Cloudiness Proposition 1:

there are more people, objects and ideas in the world

1.1 There Are More People

That there are more people in the world is incontrovertible. In 1970, there were 3,969,000,000 of us on the planet. There are now 6,577,587,970.

We don’t care much about this fact these days. Ever since Erlhich's “population bomb” failed to explode, we have concerned ourselves with other things. But I think “more people” has some interesting implications for the cloudiness proposition.

The good news is that even as the world gets larger, the mediating technologies grow apace, stretching further and sorting more nimbly. The world may be expanding but we remain the beneficiaries of what Granovetter calls the strong effects of weak ties. Cost-free communication and networking sites like LinkedIn let us navigate these expanding social worlds pretty well.

Still, even as the world gets cloudier in the good sense, it gets cloudier in the bad sense. That is to say, even as it gets larger and richer, it grows opaque and difficult to navigate.

Here’s how this works for me. (I am keenly interested in how it works for you.  Please do comment.) I have around 3000 names in my Outlook Contacts database. In a perfect world, these names would be the cloud would be a constant source of interest and utility. This would be the network I call upon to find someone to read a manuscript, answer a question, or rescue a niece stranded in Shanghai.

The trouble is some years ago my world lost its redundancy and it’s ability to stack. I have changed cities, countries, professions and industries often, and with each of these changes a section of my network goes dark. I am left staring at a card in Contacts that I can’t quite reconstruct the connection for.

Consider: Yoshimitsu Kaji.

Ok. Now, is this a guy I interviewed for an ethnography? Did he enroll as an executive at HBS? Did I meet him while consulting for Coke in Japan?  Did I correspond with him about some academic matter? Is he part of the museum world? Did he hire me for a speaking engagement? Is this some guy who offered to translate one of my books? Twelve years after the fact, it’s hard to be sure. Hard to be sure? Let’s be fair, I don’t have a clue. (For the record, my guess is that he worked for The Coca-Cola Company in Japan. Yoshimitsu, please, good sir, phone home.)

If I were a Korean teenager, this would not be a problem. Over the years, I would have sent Yoshimitsu a tiny bursts of information, mostly photos, that served a phatic purpose, that said, effectively: “I’m here, I’m fine,You’re it.” If I were a Korean teenager, Yoshimitsu would have visited my webpage on Cyworld, and he would have reciprocated with a flood of small communications of his own. The link between us would not be if not active, at least “lit.” Chances are, I would now remember who Yoshimitsu is.

But the problem is not just that I am not Korean. (Though this is a very real problem.) No, the problem is that my life is cloudy. It has reconfigured so many times that I no longer have data arrays that help to confirm one another in life and in memory. You know what I mean. Normally, we are surrounded by confirmatory events that return things from passive to active memory. We see a guy at Starbucks we went to school with, and he reminds us of 3 or 4 acquaintances who are once more make vivid.

The trouble is, and I am pretty sure this is not just my problem, there are several paradigmatic regimes, or let’s call them, cultural arrays, floating around in my life.  In each of these, things change: who I am to people, how and why I connect to people, how often and in what ways I connect to people, are different. This world is swirling and yes cloud like. I could have a conversation with someone from the museum world but it would take a moment to restore the underlying assumptions that museum people share. More to the point, it doesn’t matter how interesting or useful it would be to stay in touch with Lindsay Sharp and Charles Saumerez Smith, both of them forces in the English museum world, I am so utterly claimed by each stop along the biographical railroad that I don’t just fall “out of touch,” they actually (and utterly) fall out of sight.   I can't stay in touch because I now live, or feel I live, in an entirely different world.

It’s a three-legged race. The world gets larger, technology unfurls to keep pace, but my biographical, um, churn destroys the possibility of network integrity. Sections fall dark. Nodes die. Links detach. A cloud of potential contacts occludes. The next generation of network technologies needs to make me a series of “flight simulators” from within which I can see all the parties to whom I was connected even as I am reminded of the topics, assumptions and interests we have in common. Periodically, I can climb into one of these simulators (acting now as the husk of a former self) and ask myself, “ok, who do I know that can help me solve the problem I have right now.” The simulator will actually help me negotiate the paradigmatic regimes or cultural arrays. It will help me traverse bodies of assumptions. It will build in a new mobility as I move between what Martin Jay called “scopic regimes.”

But this is merely the retrospective version of the management of cloudiness. Despite my dismal failure to manage my existing networks, I am still keen for these to grow. I am still keen on meeting new and interesting people. And I am, as we all are, in possession of pretty good linking skills. 

I am sure someone wishing to get to know my great great grandfather would have had to grow up in the same small town in Scotland, and even then it would take years of careful scrutiny, hours of careful silence, and several pints of bitter before even tiny revelations would be risked.  (“Ay, football”  that's an entire conversation in some circles.)  We are all so good at cloudiness management, it takes us very little time to decide whether we want to make contact, what we have in common, and how to turn this commonality to mutual advantage in the ignition of a lively conversation and frank exchange of views. Indeed, in the 3 hours it takes to get from Stamford to Boston, I had a great conversation with an architect in which I learned something about parenting. Pretty personal, pretty complicated, pretty delicate. But for postmodern fellas like the two of us, pretty easy

Thanks to the new technologies, I have new and privileged access to what James Surowiecki calls the wisdom of crowds. Stumbleupon and Delicious are great way of putting to work the intelligence of strangers I will never know face to face, will never link up with in link in.  On a nearer horizon, I have access to the networking effects of what we might call the intellectual impresarios, Andrew Zolli, Piers Fawkes, Richard Saul Wurman, Russell Davies. 

What I don't have access to someone who can do virtually all the sorting for me, rendering a connection to the 20 people in the world I just have to know.  No, not the most powerful people in the world.  The people who are for the own reasons and purposes, wrestling with the same processes.  The people with whom you can just sit down and start talking.  You know the sensation.  It's like being airlifted into a world of perfect familiarity.  And it is fantastically productive.

Before his death, Hargurchet Bhabra electrified intellectual circles in Toronto by fashioning just these connections.  He created so much value for each of us in this homemake networks, handmade nodes, that it is a wonder that we didn't pay him handsomely for his effort.  And we should have.  It was merely a failure of the imagination.  And of course he would have been embarrassed by the gesture.  But there is no calculating what this blog owes Bhabra's example and intelligence.  Something more than my friendship should have gone his way.  The question is  when we will come to our senses and build the business model.  It's a little like executive recruiting, for which there is a very clear business model. Except that the recruiter makes his or her choices for a client not a corporation. 

Enough, already.  The point I wish to make that when we are thinking about the cloudiness of contemporary selves, corporations, and networks, we must grapple with the fact that there are more people, more objects and more ideas.  I know this sounds simplistic but I trying to stick to elementary propositions and build up as I go. 

Tomorrow, I will contemplate the implications of the fact that there are more objects in the world. 

References

forthcoming.

Last note:

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