Everyday Chaos

by David Weinberger

  4. Charles Van Doren, The Idea of Progress (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1967), 4–6.

  5. Ibid., 26ff.

  6. Parker actually wrote, “Look at the facts of the world. You see a continual and progressive triumph of the right. I do not pretend to understand the moral universe, the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. But from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.” See my “Does the Moral Universe Arc?,” Medium, June 18, 2015, https://perma.cc/7TMJ-HGUE.

  7. Charles William Eliot, Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books (New York: P.F. Collier and Son, 1910), 71, http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/13182.

  8. The word count comes from Robert McCrum, “The 100 Best Nonfiction Books: No 99—The History of the World by Walter Raleigh (1614),” Guardian, Dec. 25, 2017, https://perma.cc/49YC-MMGZ.

  9. G. J. Whitrow, Time in History (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1988), 46.

  10. Franklin L. Baumer, Modern European Thought: Continuity and Change in Ideas, 1600–1950 (New York: Macmillan, 1977), 118.

  11. “[T]he typical Greek tended to be backward-looking, since the future appeared to him to be the domain of total uncertainty.… As for the philosophers, Plato thought that all progress consisted in trying to approximate to a pre-existing model in the timeless world of transcendental forms and Aristotle believed that it was the realization of a form which was already present potentially. Thus, for both of them the theory of forms excluded all possibility of evolution.” Whitrow, Time in History, 46.

  12. See Jane Gleeson-White, “Mathematics, Art and God: The Divine Proportion of Luca Pacioli with Drawings by Leonardo da Vinci,” Bookish Girl (blog), Feb. 15, 2012, https://perma.cc/KW8M-YANT.

  13. This is my lousy translation of “La docte Antiquité dans toute sa durée: A l’égal de nos jours ne fut point éclairée.” At least it rhymes. The full poem is here: M. Perrault, Le siècle de Louis le Grand (Paris: chez Jean-Baptiste Coignard, 1687), https://perma.cc/V8RJ-2KLB. (It was read to the academy not by Perrault but by the abbot of Lavau.) Perrault went on to write a book about the superiority of contemporary literature to that of the ancients: Parallèle des Anciens et des Modernes (The Parallel between Ancients and Moderns).

  14. Some trace the debate considerably further back. See Douglas Lane Patey, “Ancients and Moderns,” in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 4, The Eighteenth Century, ed. H. B. Nisbet and Claude Rawson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

  15. James Henry Monk, The Life of Richard Bentley (London: C. J. G. and F. Rivington, 1830), 1:45, https://perma.cc/N5MN-JMZ6.

  16. Richard N. Ramsey, “Swift’s Strategy in The Battle of the Books,” Papers on Language and Literature 20, no. 4 (Fall 1984): 382–389, 384.

  17. Monk, Life of Richard Bentley, 48.

  18. The full title: “A Full and True Account of the Battel Fought Last Friday, between the Antient and the Modern Books in St. James’s Library,” in A Tale of a Tub, to Which Is Added “The Battle of the Books” and “The Mechanical Operation of the Spirit,” ed. A. C. Guthkelch and D. Nichol Smith (Oxford: Clarendon, 1920), https://perma.cc/4TCC-SNPS.

  19. Ramsey, “Swift’s Strategy,” 382.

  20. David Gordon, ed., The Turgot Collection (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2011), 339. The book is openly available thanks to the Mises Foundation: https://perma.cc/858Q-2WV7.

  21. Ibid., 340.

  22. Regarding the telegraph, see Tom Standage, The Victorian Internet (London: Bloomsbury, 1998).

  23. In 1974, Robert Multhauf wrote an article for that same journal that suggests both that The History of Technology was perhaps not quite as pivotal in the development of the field and that the discipline was only then, almost twenty years later, coming into its own. Multhauf says that the “literature of the history of technology” goes “back at least to Polydore Vergil’s De rerem inventoribus of 1499” (1), acknowledging that this is not exactly what we mean by a history of technology since it covers things like rites of the church and adultery. Johann Beckman at Gottingen University wrote a book called History of Inventions, published in 1805, but “did not actually write a history of technology as such” (1). One of his students, J. H. M. von Poppe, published a book called History of Technology in 1811. “Poppe’s book remained almost unique for a century and a half, during which nearly everyone forgot that it existed.” Multhauf adds, “It was simply a retrospective book on technology,” lacking the contextualization we want in a modern history (1–2). Robert P. Multhauf, “Some Observations on the State of the History of Technology,” Technology and Culture, Jan. 1974, 1–12. Also, here’s a fun fact about Louis Figuier’s 1870 history of technology: it was not translated into English, but his book on the “science” of the afterlife was. In it he claims that once we are done with our cycle of reincarnation, our soul goes to live on the sun, where we emanate rays of sunlight. He apparently meant this quite literally. Louis Figuier, Les grandes inventions anciennes et modernes dans les sciences, l’industrie et les arts (Paris: Hachette, 1870); Louis Figuier, The Tomorrow of Death, trans. S. R. Crocker (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1872), 169 (chapter summary).

  24. The history of the history of technology is far more complex than I’m letting on. For example, any such history should at least mention Lewis Mumford’s influential 1934 book Technics and Civilization, in which he argues against thinking that inventions are responsible for the big turns in history: clocks did not impose a new, more rigorous sense of time on us, and the steam engine did not lead to us becoming machinelike cogs in the economy; we instead have to ask why we were ready to invent and be molded by these tools. Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1934). Mumford was one of the contributors to the issue of Technology and Culture devoted to A History of Technology; he strongly criticized that work for not looking at the context and cultural meaning of the tools. Lewis Mumford, “Tools and the Man,” review of A History of Technology, by Charles Singer, E. J. Holmyard, A. R. Hall, and Trevor I. Williams, Technology and Culture 1, no. 4 (Autumn 1960): 320–334. In the New Yorker that same year, Mumford criticized the volumes as perpetuating our “over-commitment to technology,” as if it is “the source of a new kind of life, independent of human purposes.” Lewis Mumford, “From Erewhon to Nowhere,” New Yorker, Oct. 8, 1960, 180–197.

  25. Samuel Smiles, The Lives of the Engineers (London: Murray, 1865), 4:4.

  26. Ibid.

  27. Lawrence Lessig, The Future of Ideas (New York: Random House, 2001), 30, http://www.the-future-of-ideas.com. See also Lauren Young, “The Battle over Net Neutrality Started with the 1920s-Era ‘Hush-a-Phone,’ ” Atlas Obscura, Aug. 16, 2016, https://perma.cc/YY8K-VV5X.

  28. Lessig is superb on (among many other things) the forces that shape the openness of systems. See Lawrence Lessig, The Future of Ideas (New York: Random House, 2001), available openly at http://www.the-future-or-ideas.com. (Lessig is a founder of Creative Commons, so of course he made the book openly available online.) p. 30.

  29. Jonathan Zittrain, The Future of the Internet, and How to Stop It (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008). Zittrain is the faculty director of Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society where I am a senior researcher.

  30. Allenby and Sarewitz, The Techno-Human Condition.

  31. Thomas Kuhn, “The Road since Structure,” 1990 presidential address to the Philosophy of Science Association, in The Road since Structure: Philosophical Essays, 1970–1993, with an Autobiographical Interview, ed. James Conant and John Haugeland, 90–104 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 96.

  32. Giovanni Lanzani, “A Brief History about the Pendulum,” EP Magazine, Aug. 1, 2006, https://perma.cc/3K2L-YD5Q.

  33. “I learnt that about four hundred years previously, the state of mechanical knowledge was far beyond our own, and was advancing with prodigious rapidity, until one of the most learned p
rofessors of hypothetics wrote an extraordinary book … proving that the machines were ultimately destined to supplant the race of man.… So convincing was his reasoning, or unreasoning, to this effect, that he carried the country with him; and they made a clean sweep of all machinery that had not been in use for more than two hundred and seventy-one years … and strictly forbade all further improvements and inventions.” Samuel Butler, Erewhon, 2nd ed. (n.p.: A. C. Fifield, 1910), https://perma.cc/L2JR-6YQQ.

  34. Mark Wilson, “AI Is Inventing Languages Humans Can’t Understand. Should We Stop It?,” Fast Company, July 14, 2017, https://perma.cc/LS5L-85Q7.

  35. See my liveblogging of Antonio Torralba’s take at a Google PAIR event, Sept. 26, 2017: “[liveblog][PAIR] Antonio Torralba on Machine Vision, Human Vision,” Joho the Blog, Sept. 26, 2017, https://perma.cc/E9HB-DQQH.

  36. Brett Frischmann and Evan Selinger argue cogently against the open-endedness implied by my characterization of the human-technology relationship as “play.” They maintain that we are on a genuine slippery slope that leads us to cede too much of our autonomy to technology. Re-engineering Humanity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). They may turn out to be right; it would not be the first time I’ve been wrong.

  37. Lynn White Jr., Medieval Technology and Social Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), 38.

  38. Because White saw the stirrup as simply a catalyst, not as a cause with an inevitable effect, he’s arguably not as technodeterminist as it might seem. On the other hand, he is sometimes used as the very model of a technodeterminist historian. For example, see Matthew Fuller, “The Forbidden Pleasures of Media Determining,” in Media after Kittler, ed. Eleni Ikoniadou and Scott Wilson, 95–110 (London: Rowan & Littlefield, 2015), 96.

  39. Nicholas Carr, The Shallows (New York: Atlantic Books, 2011).

  40. Sherry Turkle, Alone Together (New York: Basic Books, 2011).

  41. Larissa MacFarquhar, “The Mind-Expanding Ideas of Andy Clark,” New Yorker, Apr. 2, 2018, https://perma.cc/MW93-6HUN.

  42. Plato, Phaedrus 274c–275b.

  43. Martin Heidegger says this most famously about technology in “The Question Concerning Technology.” His work on what he calls the Fourfold makes a similar claim. The French philosopher Bernard Stiegler’s three-volume work Technics and Time investigates the way we and things form each other. Other people to explore include Bruno Latour on the role of scientific instrumentation and institutional processes in scientific thinking, and Don Ihde on the phenomenology of technology.

  Chapter Seven

  1. For a good discussion of the two big complications of this idea—chaos and entropy—see Cesar Hildalgo, Why Information Grows (New York: Basic Books, 2015).

  2. Chris Anderson, “The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete,” Wired, June 23, 2008, https://perma.cc/5PX9-ZMY9.

  3. Massimo Pigliucci, “The End of Theory in Science?,” EMBO Reports 10, no. 6 (June 2009): 534, https://perma.cc/7BQE-TT79.

  4. Tony Hey, Stewart Tansley, and Kristin Tolle, eds., The Fourth Paradigm: Data-Intensive Scientific Discovery (Redmond, WA: Microsoft Research, 2009).

  5. Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, Nudge (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 1–3.

  6. Ibid., 3.

  7. Ibid.

  8. Vance Packard, The Hidden Persuaders (Philadelphia: David McKay, 1957), 61–62.

  9. Surprisingly, letters were indeed purposefully added to the scene, but they spell out not “SEX” but “SFX,” a shout-out to the special effects folks. See Bill Bradley, “Finally, the Truth about Disney’s ‘Hidden Sexual Messages’ Revealed,” Huffington Post, Jan. 14, 2015, https://perma.cc/R3N9-WA7Z.

  10. Packard, Hidden Persuaders, 75, 84, 86, 100, 63.

  11. Thaler and Sunstein, Nudge, 7.

  12. Wikipedia, s.v. “I’m Just a Bill,” last modified Sept. 8, 2018, https://perma.cc/86QJ-KDE3.

  13. For example, Saturday Night Live’s 2014 “How a Bill Does Not Become a Law,” YouTube video, 3:30, posted Nov. 23, 2014, https://perma.cc/2S7M-MVM3.

  14. John Hagel III, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison, The Power of Pull (New York: Basic Books, 2010).

  15. Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock (New York: Current, 2013).

  16. I moderated a book talk he gave at Harvard, and we talked about these two interpretations of the rise of long-form narratives. David Weinberger, “Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now—Douglas Rushkoff, author of Present Shock, in Conversation with David Weinberger,” Harvard Law School, June 18, 2013, https://perma.cc/9N8Y-TD2Y.

  17. Steven Johnson, Everything Bad Is Good for You (New York: Riverhead Books, 2005), 131–135.

  18. Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, vol. 2, Disorientation (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 1.

  19. See Jenny Crusie, “Rules for Golden Age Mystery Writing: Thank God It’s Not 1928 Anymore,” Argh Ink (blog), Jan. 8, 2016, https://perma.cc/G4CA-PSKQ.

  20. Daniel Pink, Free Agent Nation (New York: Warner Business Books, 2001); Mary L. Grey, “Your Job Is About to Get ‘Taskified,’ ” Los Angeles Times, Jan. 8, 2016, https://perma.cc/DM9X-C9F6.

  21. Philippa Foot, “The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of the Double Effect,” Oxford Review, no. 5 (1967): 1–7, https://perma.cc/GT2D-GVFN.

  22. For a look at the shift in what the Trolley Problem means to us, see Ian Bogost, “Enough with the Trolley Problem,” Atlantic, Mar. 30, 2018, https://perma.cc/YX3C-ZZGQ.

  23. Asimov eventually added a “zeroth” law—“A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm”—to cover some of the problematic cases that his short stories uncovered.

  24. Among many others, see Frank Pasquale, The Black Box Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015); and Kate Crawford, “Artificial Intelligence’s White Guy Problem,” New York Times, June 25, 2016, https://perma.cc/WJ4Q-Q2R3. Also see Cathy O’Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction (New York: Crown, 2016).

  25. Moritz Hardt, “Equality of Opportunity in Machine Learning,” Google AI Blog, Oct. 7, 2016, https://perma.cc/6L8P-USQZ.

  26. Arvind Narayanan, “FAT* 2018 Translation Tutorial: 21 Definitions of Fairness and Their Politics” (paper presented at the Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency [FAT*], New York University, New York, Feb. 23–24, 2018), https://perma.cc/8NLE-XKVU.

  27. J. L. Austin, Sense and Sensibilia (London: Oxford University Press, 1962). Also see J. L. Austin, “A Plea for Excuses,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, n.s., 57 (1956–1957): 1–30, https://perma.cc/6QHH-J5E9. I wrote about this many years ago when I was an assistant professor of philosophy: “Austin’s Flying Arrow: A Missing Metaphysics of Language and World,” Man and World 17, no. 2 (1984): 175–195.

  28. G. E. M. Anscombe, “Modern Moral Philosophy,” Philosophy 3, no. 124 (Jan. 1958): 1–19, https://perma.cc/CJQ7-F58C.

  29. To pick just one work of note because of its particular relevance to technology, Shannon Vallor, a professor of philosophy at Santa Clara University, has written an excellent book on virtue ethics: Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

  30. Alexander Mordvintsev, Christopher Olah, and Mike Tyka, “Inceptionism: Going Deeper into Neural Networks,” Google Research Blog, June 17, 2015, https://perma.cc/RU2C-58DH.

  31. The effect of the connected digital realm on how we think about order and meaning is the topic of my book Everything Is Miscellaneous (New York: Times Books, 2007).

  32. You can see the math for this at a discussion at Stack Exchange, “Is Earth as Smooth as a Billiard Ball?,” question posed on Sept. 6, 2012, https://perma.cc/PN3X-SUFH.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  This bibliography lists all sources cited and a selected set of resources consulted but not cited. An inclusive list can be found at https://bit.ly/EverydayChaosBib.

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