Westerners tended to focus on objects and put them into categories, while Easterners looked at backgrounds and considered bigger environmental forces. Westerners used formal logic to figure things out, while Easterners used a variety of strategies. As Nisbett explains, “East Asians reason holistically—that is, they focus on the object in its surrounding field, there is little concern with categories or universal rules, and behavior is explained on the basis of the forces presumed to be operative for the individual case at a particular time. Formal logic is not much used and instead a variety of dialectic reasoning types are common, including synthesis, transcendence and convergence.”19
These pairs—the American and the Asian, the hedgehog and the fox, the expert and the generalist—suggest two main ways of managing and creating change: influence the players or manipulate the greater environment. When we focus on the pieces, we are working in what could be considered the timescape of chronos: we break objects down into their parts, study them carefully, focus in, and engage with the pieces scientifically. Like dissection, it works best when the subjects are dead. When we focus on the space around the pieces, we have shifted to the time sensibility of kairos. The space between things matters more than the things themselves. We are thinking less about tinkering with particular objects than about recognizing or influencing the patterns they create and the connections they make. We stop getting dizzy following the path of every feedback loop and pull back to see the patterns those loops create.
In a more practical sense, it’s the difference between trying to change your customer’s behavior by advertising to him, or changing the landscape of products from which he has to choose; trying to convince people in a foreign nation to like you by crafting new messaging, or simply building a hospital for them; planning by committee where to pave the paths on a new college campus, or watching where the grass has been worn down by footsteps and putting the paths there.
As economist and policy consultant Joshua Ramo puts it, focusing on the environment gives one access to the “slow variables” that matter so much more in the long run than surface noise. His book The Age of the Unthinkable is directed primarily at policy makers and military strategists, but his insights apply widely to the culture of the fractal. In language likely surprising to his own community of readers, Ramo suggests leaders develop “empathy.” He doesn’t mean just crying at the misfortune of others but rather learning how to experience the world through the sensibilities of as many other people as possible.
Ramo is particularly intrigued by a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, Sequoia Capital partner Michael Moritz, a very early and successful investor in Google and YouTube. Unlike most of his peers, Moritz did not break down companies or technologies in order to understand them. “Moritz’s genius was that he wasn’t cutting companies up as he looked at them but placing them in context. The forces shaping a technology market, consumer demands, changes in software design, shifts in microchip pricing, the up-and-down emotions of a founder—he was watching all of these for signs of change.”20
Moritz understood Google’s single-pointed vision to index the Web but insisted that the only path to that goal was to constantly improvise. In order to lead his companies through the kinds of changes they needed to make, he believed he needed to understand their goals as well as the founders did. He required the ability to lose himself in their dreams. “The thing I am terrified of is losing that empathy,” Moritz explains. “The best investments we have missed recently came because the founders came in here and we blew them off because we didn’t understand them. We couldn’t empathize. That is a fatal mistake. If I were running American foreign policy, I would want to focus on empathizing.”21
Empathy isn’t just studying and understanding. It’s not something one learns but a way of feeling and experiencing others. It’s like the difference between learning how to play a song and learning how to resonate with one that’s already being played. It is less about the melody than the overtones. Or in networking terms, less about the nodes than the connections between them.
My own Zen master of such connections is Jerry Michalski, a technology analyst who used to edit Esther Dyson’s Release 1.0 newsletter and then left to go into what seemed to me to be a sort of public reclusiveness. I’d see him at almost every technology or digital culture conference I could make time to attend, usually because I was doing a talk or panel myself. Jerry seemed content to attend for attendance’ sake. He’d just sit there with his laptop, tapping away during everyone’s speeches, actually reading the PowerPoint slides people put up behind them, and, later, Tweeting quotes and re-Tweeting those quoted by others.
I first met Jerry when I sat next to him at a conference in Maine in 1998, shortly after he had resigned from his editorial post. We were listening to someone I don’t remember speak about something I can’t recall. What I do remember is that I peeked down to see what he was writing on his computer. It wasn’t text at all, but a visualized web of connections between words. “It’s called TheBrain,”22 Jerry told me. He would enter a name, a fact, a company—whatever. And then he’d connect it to the other things, people, books, ideas, in his system already. He put me in, added my speaking and literary agents, connected me to my books, my influences, my college, as well as some of the ideas and terms I had coined. “I think it might be useful for understanding what’s going on.”
As of today, Jerry has over 173,000 thoughts in his brain file, and 315,000 links between them, all created manually.23 And he is finally emerging from his public reclusiveness to share what he learned with the rest of us. His chief insight, as he puts it, is that “everything is deeply intertwingled.” He no longer thinks of any thought or idea in isolation, but in context. Jerry describes himself as a pattern finder and lateral thinker. Everything matters only insofar as its relationship to everything else.
Surprisingly, offloading his memory to the computer in this fashion has not damaged his recall, but improved it. The act of storing things in relationship to other things has reinforced their place in his real brain’s memory. And going back into TheBrain “refreshes my neural pathways.” They are not random facts but parts of the greater fabric—components in the greater pattern.
Most important, however, Michalski has become a great advocate for what he calls “The Relationship Economy”—the economy of how people are connected to one another. As he and microfinance innovator April Rinne explained in a recent Washington Post op-ed, “Say, for example, you are trying to solve a complex problem such as the global financial crisis. Do you ask an economist, a sociologist or a political scientist? Each of them individually is too constrained. The more multi-faceted the problem, the more forces intersect and the more challenges one must face within a siloed system.”24
On the one hand, this means democratizing innovation and change—not crowdsourcing, per say, where you just get customers to do your advertising work for you—but creating an environment where everyone connected with a culture or industry feels welcome to participate in its development. It’s the way amateur gearheads develop the best new technologies for cycling, which are then incorporated into the designs and products of major manufacturers. It’s the way Adobe encourages the users of its programs to create their own plug-ins, which are then shared online or incorporated into the next release. It’s the way Google provides free online tutorials on how to make Android apps, in the hope that an open development culture can eventually beat Apple’s “walled garden” of more professionally devised products.
On the other hand, it means coming to understand that—at least in the fractal—one’s relationships matter more than one’s accumulated personal knowledge; the shared overtakes the owned; connections supersede the ego. Contrast, for example, Michalski’s selfless Brain to Microsoft’s celebration of individual immortality online, the MyLifeBits project. In this public display of solipsism, we are encouraged to marvel at and model the behavior of researcher Dr. Gordon Bell, who has scanned, recorded, and uploaded every
thing he can about himself—lectures, memos, letters, home movies, phone calls, voice-mail—since 1998.25 The reward for turning his entire life into bits is that Microsoft’s archival software will then allow him to access anything he has done or seen, at any time in his life.
The promise is that, through computers, we gain a perfect memory. Bell and Microsoft claim they are realizing Vannevar Bush’s original 1950s dream for personal computing, which was to externalize one’s memory into a perfect record: total recall. In reality, of course, the project models and publicizes a mode of behavior that would make a market researcher drool. This is the Facebook reality, in which we operate under the false assumption that we are the users of the platform, when we are actually the product being sold. Moreover, on a subtler level, it uses computers to heighten the sense that we are what we perceive and experience as individuals, and that the recordable bits of information about ourselves reflects who we are. The marketer loves data on individuals, since it’s individuals who can be influenced to make purchases. The market loves individuals, too, since the less networked people are, the less they share and the more they have to buy for themselves.
More important, however, as an approach to a postnarrative world in which living networks replace linear histories, MyLifeBits is entirely more vulnerable to fractalnoia than TheBrain. For Michalski, the “self” is defined by connections. TheBrain isn’t about him, but about everyone else he has met. It is not limited to a single path, but instead suggests an infinity of possible pathways through data. The patterns are out there, constantly evolving and becoming increasingly “intertwingled.” It’s all potential energy. Maintaining this state—this readiness-is-all openness—isn’t easy, but it’s the only way to create context without time.
MyLifeBits, on the other hand, approaches memory as the storage of a personal narrative over time. It is not really stored potential energy as much as a record of spent kinetic energy. It is a diary, both egocentric and self-consumed. Moreover, once stored, it is locked down. History no longer changes with one’s evolving sensibilities; it describes limits and resists reinterpretation. One’s path narrows. As far as doing pattern recognition in a landscape of present shock, the user must identify entirely with sequences of self. Everything relates, as long as it relates back to himself. Where was I when I saw that? How did I think of that the first time I did it? How does that reflect on me?
This is the difference between the networked sensibility and paranoia—between pattern recognition and full-fledged fractalnoia. The fractalnoid is developing the ability to see the connections between things but can only understand them as having something to do with himself. This is the very definition of paranoia. As the title of Gordon Bell’s best archived speech on the project explains it, “MyLifeBits: A Transaction Processing Database for Everything Personal.”
But that’s just it: in a fractal landscape, nothing is personal. This may be the hardest lesson for victims of present shock to accept: it’s not about you.
APOCALYPTO
As I saw it, his big mistake was showing me the compound at all. But I suppose the numerous construction crews and contractors responsible for converting this former missile silo into an apocalypse bunker know its location as well. So does the documentary crew from History Channel who filmed him there a few weeks before my own visit. Still, a promise is a promise, so I won’t tell you in which Midwestern state (starts with K) “Dan” (not his real name) has built the bunker he believes will be capable of sustaining him and his family through the apocalypse.
“I don’t mean apocalypse in the religious way,” Dan explains as he escorts me down the single spiral metal staircase leading to the living quarters. (Hard to get out in a fire, I suppose, but easier to defend if attacked.) “I’m thinking Contagion, Asteroid, even China Syndrome,” he explains, using movie-title shorthand for global pandemic, collision with an asteroid, or nuclear meltdown. He is used to being interviewed.
“What about The Day After Tomorrow?” I suggest, bringing climate change into the mix.
“Not likely,” Dan says. “That’s been debunked.”
Dan is a former real estate assessor who now makes his living selling information online to “preppers” like himself, who have assumed that catastrophe is imminent and that the best way through is to prepare for the inevitable collapse of civilization as we know it. Even without an apocalypse, the bunker is about as nice as one could expect a windowless underground apartment to get. It has been built into the control rooms of a decommissioned nuclear missile silo that is surrounded by a dozen feet of concrete in all directions.
Still, the air is significantly cooler and more pollen-free than the summer-scorched fields aboveground, making the place feel more than livable. There’s a little kitchen done up in ’70s colors: lime green laminate countertops and orange vinyl chairs. It’s a bit like what you’d see in a nice trailer home or on a houseboat. There’s a door leading to a series of pantries I’m told contain a ten-year supply of food for six people. On the next level, three bedrooms and a media room with built-in monitors and a couch that looks like it time traveled from an Avengers episode. The whole place has been meticulously designed—not just its interior finishes but the solar-powered generators, the air-purification system, the radiation shielding, and the intrusion-deterrence system. It is as well thought-out as ten screenplays, with each doomsday scenario integrated into the layout or hardware.
I can’t help but imagine myself in this setting, having time to watch the entire Criterion Collection of DVDs, read the philosophy I’ve never had time for (most of whatever happened between Saint Thomas Aquinas and, say, Francis Bacon), or get to know my family without the pressures of homework, the Internet, or neighbors. Time for . . .
And then I realize I have been sucked in by the allure. This missile silo repurposed as a bomb shelter isn’t a Plan B at all, but a fantasy. Whether Dan ever has to—or gets to—live in this place, its mere creation may be its truest purpose. Where the basement model railroad once gave the underachiever a chance to build and run a world, the doomsday apartment gives the overwhelmed present-shock victim the chance to experience the relief of finality and a return to old-fashioned time.
Dan and thousands of other preppers and doomsdayers around the world (but particularly in the United States) expect a complete societal breakdown in their own lifetimes. Their visions are confirmed by media such as History Channel’s Armageddon week or ads on Christian and right-wing radio for MREs (meals, ready to eat, used by soldiers) and silver coins (to use after the collapse of the banking system). A company named Vivos is selling reservations for apartments in a Walmart-sized bunker in Nebraska. An initial down payment of $25,000 earns you a place in an underground community where they have thought of everything, from a beauty salon to a small prison for those who might get out of control after the world is gone.
Sales of Vivos and similar bunkers increase tenfold during well-covered disasters such as nuclear accidents, pandemic scares, and terrorist events. But there’s more than rational self-preservation at work here. Apocalyptic headlines give justification to a deeper urge. Any natural or man-made disaster simply provides the pretense to succumb to what we will call apocalypto—a belief in the imminent shift of humanity into an unrecognizably different form.
At least the annihilation of the human race—or its transmogrification into silicon—resolves the precarious uncertainty of present shock. So far in our journey, we have seen the human story collapse from a narrative into an endless occupation or infinite game. We have seen how digital technology continually challenges our coherence and connection to the natural rhythms that used to define our biology and psychology alike. We have watched banks and businesses compress time into time, leveraging the moment like an overwound spring. And we have seen identity itself devolve into a nonlocal pattern in a depersonalized fractal. Apocalypto gives us a way out. A line in the sand. An us and a them. And, more important, a before and an after.
That�
�s why it’s important that we distinguish between valid concerns about the survival of our species and these more fantastic wishes for reversal and recognition—the story elements at the end of all heroic journeys. If anything, the common conflation of so many apocalypse scenarios—bird flu, asteroid, terrorist attack—camouflages ones that may actually be in progress, such as climate change or the slow poisoning of the oceans. In their book The Last Myth, Mathew Barrett and Mel Gilles put it this way:
By allowing the challenges of the 21st century to be hijacked by the apocalyptic storyline, we find ourselves awaiting a moment of clarity when the problems we must confront will become apparent to all—or when those challenges will magically disappear, like other failed prophecies about the end of the world. Yet the real challenges we must face are not future events that we imagine or dismiss through apocalyptic scenarios of collapse—they are existing trends. The evidence suggests that much of what we fear in the future—the collapse of the economy, the arrival of peak oil and global warming and resource wars—has already begun. We can wait forever, while the world unravels before our very eyes, for an apocalypse that won’t come.1
For many, it’s easier, or at least more comforting, to approach these problems as intractable. They’re just too complex and would involve levels of agreement, cooperation, and coordination that seem beyond the capacity of humans at this stage in our cultural evolution, anyway. So in lieu of doing the actual hard work of fixing these problems in the present, we fantasize instead about life afterward. The crisis of global warming morphs into the fantasy of living off the grid. The threat of a terrorist attack on our office tower leads us to purchase an emergency personal parachute for easy egress, and to wonder how far up the org chart we might be promoted once everyone else is gone. The collapse of civilization due to nuclear accident, peak oil, or SARS epidemic finally ends the ever-present barrage of media, tax forms, toxic spills, and mortgage payments, opening the way to a simpler life of farming, maintaining shelter, and maybe defending one’s family.
Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now Page 25