Berliners #8: Red String
January 26, 2016 By
We Are All Architects Now
December 17, 2015 By
When I had my first mid-life crisis at age 17, I really didn’t know how to handle it. I went from sociable and friendly to morose and uncommunicative overnight, and stayed that way for a year. Now, 24 years later, I am getting really good at navigating them. I predicted 11 of my last 5 mid-life crises. I’m now skilled enough that I can provide expert consulting support to people who are too busy to have mid-life crises frequently enough to get good at it.
The key is to freak out early and freak out often (FEFO) in an agile way, and work towards a lifestyle that (ideally) feels like one continuously integrated and deployed mid-life crisis. There is actually good intellectual justification for approaching life this way. It’s called the Lindy effect, which says you’ll live as long again as you already have, until you don’t.
Which means you’re always at mid-life. Until you’re not.
This can be a difficult idea to grasp, so as Matt Damon said recently about poop-grown potatoes on Mars, we’re going to have to discourse the shit out of this thing.
The Awe Delusion
November 12, 2015 By
Art is a technology. If you did a Casablanca / Law & Order double feature you might notice that although Casablanca perhaps has more ‘artistic value’ (that horribly vague phrase), Law & Order tells its stories with a mind-boggling efficiency that vastly outstrips the former. Some time after 1960 filmmakers learned how to tell more story with less. They learned how to convey more information in less time and without losing depth. If this kind of compression is one example of artistic technology, in other words, we’ve gotten so much better at it that even the workingman filmmakers that produce network television can do it. It’s artistic electricity. Literacy.
According to this model, you could call some artistic movements technological inventions. Or even technological revolutions. Painting realistically, non-linear narrative, or syncopation are all examples of things that had to be invented. And these practical inventions reflect more systemic, abstract inventions that could better be described as ‘ways of thinking.’ The invention of realism, for example, changed the scope of things art could (or should) be about from what was moral or pleasurable to what was truthful. Modernism, in turn, suggested that what was truthful could be approached by methods other than object-level realism. And so on, and so forth.
My interest in art as a subject is not because of philosophical fascination on its own merits. My interest is fundamentally practical: I want more art that is good. I write about art because of the sneaking suspicion that on some level ‘artistic value’ is a technology too. That ‘good’ is a technology. That it’s something that can be in some way broken down or optimized. That it’s something people can be literate in.
Distinctions and Differences
October 22, 2015 By
The Rumsfeld epistemology of ignorance, along with Taleb’s popular expositions of it, has been one of the more useful additions to the zeitgeist in the last decade. Here’s my 2×2 version, in case you’ve been hiding under a rock since 2003.
This is possibly the most basic map of external, objective realities you can make up.
I’ve long felt that it should be possible to make an equally basic map of internal, subjective realities. I think I have one now.
What is the Largest Collective Action, Ever?
September 29, 2015 By
I’ve lately become interested in the question of climate change from the perspective of the scale of organizational capabilities that are emerging globally to tackle it (a question that exists and matters whether or not you believe climate change is real). I came up with this conceptual graph to think about it. I’ll explain my capability measure c in a minute.
In some ways, “dealing with climate change” is the largest, most complex collective action ever contemplated by humans. Here I don’t mean collective action in the leftist sense of a political coalition based on egalitarianism and solidarity. I mean any kind of large-scale action involving coordination (not getting in each other’s way), cooperation (not working at cross-purposes), collaboration (combining efforts intelligently) and conflict (structured adversarial interactions encompassed by the system to allow net action to emerge from a set of warring ideologies), in a politically neutral sense. Everything from weaponized sacredness (think the Pope’s statements on climate change) to war and unmanaged refugee crises can fit into this broad definition, but as I’ll argue, it’s not so broad as to be useless.
So the definition includes everything from the pyramids of Egypt and the Great Wall of China to the Normandy landings in WW II, the building of Standard Oil, the modern bond market, and the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Historically, the “peak-load capabilities” of our biggest collective action systems have been expanding steadily, modulo some ups and downs in the interstices of imperial ages, since the Neolithic revolution and the first pot-sized granary.
The interesting question is, what are those “some ways” in which a response to climate change futures is unprecedented, and what does that imply for the likelihood of it succeeding?
A useful way to focus this question is to ask what is the largest collective action, ever, and how much of a stretch are we talking to respond to (say) a speculative 2-degree rise scenario?
How to be a Precious Snowflake
September 17, 2015 By
Every few months, one of my much more successful friends will get frustrated by my apparent lack of aggressive hustle in service of my own work, and declare that I could be 10x better known and make 10x as much money if only I did x. The unstated assumption is that I am perversely being a precious snowflake by not doing x.
Every few weeks, I also have a different kind of conversation, usually sparked by a particularly poignant email from a youngish reader who has been persuaded by something I wrote to “go sociopath” (a la Butters going Professor Chaos). Typically, my new best friend will express a desire (and seek my help) to pursue some creative mission of personal, soul-enriching significance, without getting eaten alive by some species of shark in their waters. These emails often strike me as precious (as in snowflake, as well as in every other sense of the term).
We need a term for an anti-snowflake. I propose clod.
If you view someone as a precious snowflake, they necessarily view you as a clod. This post is about the clod-snowflake dynamic. All culture arises out of it.
Why Nerds Have Bad Taste
September 10, 2015 By
This is a continuation of my Better Art Vocabulary series. You don’t need to have read the others, but feel free.
I grew up encouraged to an old-school sense of taste. Not as old-school as opera and $300 bottles of wine, but as old-school as liking literature and paintings and museums for no real reason other than that I was supposed to, and thinking that other stuff was kind of…unclean. I have two peculiarly strong memories from when I was young: one was my mother saving up to take me to a DaVinci show in New York, and the other was being caught watching Pokemon–which struck about the same fear in my heart as being caught masturbating might have done. Taking me to that show was a truly beautiful thing to do, and an important youthful artistic experience, but it caused some internal conflict. Why did certain artistic things deserve sacrifice, and others shame?
The Greater Ribbonfarm Cultural Region 2015
September 8, 2015 By
A special treat for you today: the 2015 Greater Ribbonfarm Cultural Region map. Vastly improved since the 2012 version, much better illustrated (by Grace Witherell) and representative of an older, if not necessarily wiser blogger. Click for a bigger image. This map will now be available on the You-Are-Here page via the sidebar link.
Rather serendipitously, Sarah just posted a thoughtful piece on the nature of maps like this, so I won’t bore you with meta-commentary. Since she is now a contributing editor, I figured I’d put her on the map. You can have some fun figuring out where she is on the map and why.
I won’t attempt much commentary other than to say that some things have stayed the same, some things have changed, some things have been dropped, and many more things have been added. If you’ve been reading ribbonfarm long enough, comparing the 2012 and 2015 maps side by side on two monitors might be fun. I think the evolution says quite a bit about me, but probably more about the changes in the cultural environment in which bloggers like me exist.
I plan to do a screencast narration/virtual walking tour of the map soon, so I’ll leave my detailed riffing for that. In the meantime, you can Ask Me Anything about the map in the comments.
I’m pleased enough with this thing that I might reverse my position on never doing schwag, and put this up for sale in the form of a printed poster.
Addendum: Thanks to Carlos Bueno and Anthony DiFranco for suggestions that made it into the map.
Cartographic Compression
September 3, 2015 By
Cartography is the practice of making maps. In the narrowest sense, a map is a symbolic depiction of geographic, spatial information, inscribed onto a two-dimensional surface. In a broader sense, a map is an abstract representation of information about any domain, spatial or otherwise – “abstract” in the sense that certain features or kinds of information are highlighted to the exclusion of others. But not every abstract representation is a map. Maps have axes, usually at least two; they elucidate relationships between features of the domain; and they are useful for orienting, navigating, or engaging in goal-directed behavior within that domain.
Maps that are inscribed on some kind of surface – paper, clay, rock, or an electronic screen – are useful for sharing, pointing at, and comparing with the domain. But the cognitive capacity for map-style thinking likely precedes cartographic inscription. Intimate familiarity with the domain, viewed through the special attention-directing lens of language, is enough to generate mental maps in different minds that are verifiably highly similar. [Read more…]
Frontierland
August 6, 2015 By
Sarah Perry is a contributing editor of Ribbonfarm.
Disneyland is the most important place in America, and Frontierland is the most important part of Disneyland. By area, it is the largest part of Disneyland. The design of Frontierland occupied a special importance for Walt Disney himself (Richard Francaviglia, Walt Disney’s Frontierland as an Allegorical Map of the American West). Even as the Imagineers had trouble keeping the futuristic buildings of Tommorowland looking “futuristic,” the archaic appeal of Frontierland never faded. Frontierland does not refer to just any frontier: it presents an immersive narrative about the American western frontier, a narrative centered on popular myth and literature. (There is no American Indian genocide in Frontierland, because Frontierland is not about the historical reality of the American frontier.) But its appeal reaches far beyond the American West, drawing visitors from all over the world and self-replicating in Japan, Hong Kong, and France. As the American frontier ceased to exist as a geographic and political reality, in myth it transcended space and culture.
As much as it is composed of myth, theater, and simulation, Frontierland is actually the real frontier.
Disneyland Main Street Station, 1960
[Read more…]
