I do not enjoy Facebook — I find it cloying and impossible — but I am there every day. Last year I watched a friend struggle through breast cancer treatment in front of hundreds of friends. She broadcast her news with caution, training her crowd in how to react: no drama, please; good vibes; videos with puppies or kittens welcomed. I watched two men grieve for lost children — one man I’ve only met online, whose daughter choked to death; one an old friend, whose infant son and daughter, and his wife and mother-in-law, died in an auto accident.
I watched in real time as these people reconstructed themselves in the wake of events — altering their avatars, committing to new causes, liking and linking, boiling over in anger at dumb comments, eventually posting jokes again, or uploading new photos. Learning to take the measure of the world with new eyes. No other medium has shown me this in the same way. Even the most personal literary memoir has more distance, more compression, than these status updates.
Things get faster. My kids travelled round the world before they could walk. We seem to be getting through an epoch a decade; this is my third epoch, maybe the fourth?
Julian Barnes’ Porcupine is about the overthrow and subsequent trial of a communist dictator, Petkanov, in a fictional East European country. It’s set on the cusp of the very real epochal handover which took place in Central and Eastern Europe in the early 90s.
Petkanov taunts his prosecutor, Solinsky, with a question about his alleged monstrous nature. Monsters are, by definition, something ‘other’, he says. You can’t escape from the ‘other’ and it makes little sense to put monsters on trial for they have – literally – no capacity for culpability. From the New York Times review:
“Either I am a monster or I am not,” Petkanov says to Solinsky at the end of the trial. “Yes? If I am not, then I must be someone like you, or someone you might be capable of becoming.”
Eschatology used to be about monsters and gods. Now it’s about people like us. Many of the Possible Future Global Catastrophes are still essentially monstrous, it’s true. But the sins of omission that are their mostly likely cause are uniquely human.
It’s not like we’ve not had it spelled out clearly. Nicholas Nassim Taleb has given us Black Swans and warned why globalisation is combinatorially dangerous. Buzz Hollings gives us Panarchy:
Holling and his colleagues call their ideas “panarchy theory”-after Pan, the ancient Greek god of nature. Together with anthropologist and historian Joseph Tainter’s ideas on complexity and social collapse, this theory helps us see our world’s tectonic stresses as part of a long-term global process of change and adaptation. It also illustrates the way catastrophe caused by such stresses could produce a surge of creativity leading to the renewal of our global civilization. . .
Panarchy theory had its origins in Holling’s meticulous observation of the ecology of forests. He noticed that healthy forests all have an adaptive cycle of growth, collapse, regeneration, and again growth. During the early part of the cycle’s growth phase, the number of species and of individual plants and animals quickly increases, as organisms arrive to exploit all available ecological niches. The total biomass of these plants and animals grows, as does their accumulated residue of decay-for instance, the forest’s trees get bigger, and as these trees and other plants and animals die, they rot to form an ever-thickening layer of humus in the soil. Also, the flows of energy, materials, and genetic information between the forest’s organisms become steadily more numerous and complex. If we think of the ecosystem as a network, both the number of nodes in the network and the density of links between the nodes rise.
During this early phase of growth, the forest ecosystem is steadily accumulating capital. As its total mass grows, so does its quantity of nutrients, along with the amount of information in the genes of its increasingly varied plants and animals. Its organisms are also accumulating mutations in their genes that could be beneficial at some point in the future. And all these changes represent what Holling calls greater “potential” for novel and unexpected developments in the forest’s future.
As the forest’s growth continues, its components become more linked together-the ecosystem’s “connectedness” goes up-and as this happens it evolves more ways of regulating itself and maintaining its stability. . .
This growth phase can’t go on indefinitely. Holling implies-very much as Tainter argues in his theory-that the forest’s ever-greater connectedness and efficiency eventually produce diminishing returns by reducing its capacity to cope with severe outside shocks. Essentially, the ecosystem becomes less resilient. The forest’s interdependent trees, worms, beetles, and the like become so well adapted to a specific range of circumstances-and so well organized as an efficient and productive system-that when a shock pushes the forest far outside that range, it can’t cope. Also, the forest’s high connectedness helps any shock travel faster across the ecosystem. And finally, the forest’s high efficiency makes it harder for it to realize its rising potential for novelty. . .
Overall, then, the forest ecosystem becomes rigid and brittle. It becomes, as Holling says, “an accident waiting to happen.”
So in the late part of the growth phase of any living system like a forest, three things are happening simultaneously: the system’s potential for novelty is increasing, its connectedness and self-regulation are also increasing, but its overall resilience is falling. At this point in the life of a forest, a sudden event such as a windstorm, wildfire, insect outbreak, or drought can trigger the collapse of the whole ecosystem.
We’re living in the midst of shallowness and a narcissism epidemic - is one way of looking at it. Another is that, with the monsters demythologised and events moving so fast and everything hyperconnected in panarchic intertwingularity, we have a new perspective on things. It’s not so much we’re shallow, but that our view on the world has tilt-shifted.
It doesn’t make much sense to stop and stare too much at individual details in the Garden of Panarchy; a systems approach is more useful. This distance is easy to misconstrue, though. A holistic worldview and misanthropy can seem to have a great deal in common.
In The Third Man, Harry Lime (played by Awesome Welles) famously describes his feelings about the ‘dots’ from a high vantage point on the ferris wheel in an occupied post-war Vienna’:
Look down there. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you 20,000 pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money? Or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare?
He goes on:
Nobody thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don’t. Why should we? They talk about the people and the proletariat, I talk about the suckers and the mugs – it’s the same thing. They have their five-year plans, so have I.
From these elevations does temptation come – Matthew 4:8:
Again, the devil taketh him up into an exceeding high mountain, and sheweth him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them.
But there are good temptations and bad temptations; there’s monsters and there’s people like us.
While most of us aren’t collapsitarians, I do sometimes wonder if we don’t have a fascination for the game of civilisational collapse. I suspect that the post-apocalyptic scenarios of many games and films is more about a sense of agency and power than it is about tragedy. Armageddon looks like fun.
Finnish research on The Psychophysiology of Video Gaming [PDF] studied things like fun. The researchers observed this in players of Super Monkey Bowl 2:
Unexpectedly, we found that Event 1 (the monkey falls off the edge of the lane to the depth of outer space) elicited an increase in positive affect as indexed by an increase in zygomatic and orbicularis oculi EMG activity, and a decrease in negative affect as indexed by a reduction in corrugator EMG activity. In addition, the event elicited arousal as indexed by an increase in SCL (IBI data were somewhat equivocal). Thus, although the event in question represents a clear failure, several physiological indices showed that it elicited positively valenced high-arousal emotion (i.e., joy), rather than disappointment. This is an important finding suggesting that event characteristics such as visual impressiveness and excitingness may be more potent determinants of the emotional response of the player compared to the meaning of the event in terms of failure or success.
Gaming thinker, Jesper Juul, is cautious of reading too much into this, but notes in this piece on gamers’ contradictory views on failure:
Although players do not want to fail, they may nevertheless enjoy it when feeling responsible for it. . .
. . . failure is central to the experience of depth in a game. . .
The more famous quote from the Awesome Welles Ferris Wheel scene is this:
In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed – but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. So long, Holly.
Games, fantasy and delusions of agency: Ferris Club
Lately I was intrigued by Quentin Stevens article on “Why Berlin´s Holocaust Memorial is such a popular playground?”. In the article he highlights the people´s need for proactive role in exploring landscapes and appropriating spaces to suit their varied desires. He argues that individuals´ needs and interests for remembrance (or self presentation?) are more varied and less understood and therefore harder to support or control through design. . .
Peter Eisenman´s Memorial to the Murdered Jews, opened 2005 in Berlin, is 2 hectare field of 2711 concrete pillars. There has been a lot talk about the politics of its creation, but less talk about how visitors have appropriated the setting for many unanticipated activities. The Memorial lacks clear symbolism and obvious function and therefore invites free interpretation.
The MMJE´s scale and omni-directionality reduces formality: unlike many memorials, there is no focal axis or “front”. Its pillars provide a multiplicity of audience seating and stages where people can meet their needs to see and be seen. Security staff only patrol the perimeter and act only to prevent dangerous uses, not uses which are merely undesirable. Eisenman intended this memorial to induce clautrophobia, disorientation, isolation, confinemet and unsteadiness. Without moral guidance such direct sensory arousal often instead stimulates play.
From Public is Claiming Space – Play at DesignShifter
A Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe gets used as a playground? There’s some photos below; you have to admit, it does look kind of fun. It’s beautiful, it’s got wabi sabi, it’s, erm, playful.
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial is perhaps similarly oblique. When the design was first made public:
Newspaper critics, politicians, and some veterans recoiled. Opponents blasted the design as “a black gash of shame,” “a scar,” even “a tribute to Jane Fonda.”
Some war memorials, such as the Animals in War memorial in London, are a lot less playful. It’s difficult to respond to this with a straight face. The memorial’s strapline, “They had no choice,” seems unintentionally and darkly humourous. Did all the people who died have a choice? Is the memorial a bitingly satirical comment on the way that the population were treated like livestock by their leaders?
by anosmia
People have played with more recent wars too. Death Mask leaves little room for the imagination. And there’s a simple binary, non-transformative choice involved in Boot Hill too; you’ll agree or disagree, just like you did before you saw it.
Death Mask
A webby equivalent of the memorial-as-art might be the interactive graphic. Or the newsgame. I have no idea whether the more enjoyable the graphic or game is, the more ‘effective’ it becomes. I’m fairly sure that the ones that aren’t will get ignored, though.
As I understand it, Nicholas Nassim Taleb’s argument runs something like this:
We’ve always been vulnerable to shocks. Shocks – the Black Swans – are unavoidable.
The size of a shock is partly a function of the size of the system it affects. Globalisation means shocks can be very large indeed.
The internet and digital abundance are other factors. Because they’re not rooted in the physical world, they can produce changes that are unintuitive and, erm, shocking.
Complex financial instruments are a feature of the internet and digital abundance. We’re not capable of understanding them from our human perspective.
We’re not, as a species, capable of thinking about ‘debt’ in a rational manner. It simply isn’t real to us. Empirical evidence demonstrates this clearly.
Therefore, a combination of a massively hyper-connected system, digital goods and complex financial instruments are cognitive kryptonite.
We only have two rational responses to this:
End globalisation
Convert debt (which we’re not capable of thinking about) to equity (which we are, relatively, because we own a stake)
This summary comes from what Nassim Taleb says on this radio show.
Here’s a piece from ft.com in which he and Mark Spitznagel lay it out, slightly differently to my mind:
Our analysis is as follows. First, debt and leverage cause fragility; they leave less room for errors as the economic system loses its ability to withstand extreme variations in the prices of securities and goods. Equity, by contrast, is robust: the collapse of the technology bubble in 2000 did not have significant consequences because internet companies, while able to raise large amounts of equity, had no access to credit markets.
Second, the complexity created by globalisation and the internet causes economic and business values (such as company revenues, commodity prices or unemployment) to experience more extreme variations than ever before. Add to that the proliferation of systems that run more smoothly than before, but experience rare, but violent blow-ups.
I’ve probably got this wrong. If you read it and spot how, I’d appreciate a heads-up.
Not really capable of adding much detail to this, so I won’t. But it’s part of an ongoing investigation into my longitudinal but mild obsession on how much we’re dependent on language as a tool for encoding information.
There’s loads of internet-is-eating-my-brain stuff out there, which, frankly, I’m not that interested in. What I am interested in is just how little fiction I’m reading and what effect this is having on me. But that’s for another post. (Hence the ‘I’ in the title.)
Ed Yong’s blog:
The idea that language affects thought isn’t new. It’s encapsulated by the ‘Sapir-Whorf hypothesis’, which suggests that differences in the languages we speak affect the way we think and behave. Typically, scientists test this link between language and thought by either comparing people who speak different languages, or by watching children as they, and their linguistic skills, develop. But both approaches have problems. Speakers of different languages also vary in many other ways that can affect the way they think, while growing children are also developing in many other aspects of their mental skills, which could confuse any effect of language alone.
But NSL [Nicaraguan Sign Language] cuts through both of these problems. Here is a language that was learned by successive waves of children whose mental skills were relatively mature, who all came from the same culture, and who all learned the language at the same age. . .
Pyers explains, “The first-cohort signers find these [spatial awareness] tasks challenging because they do not have the language to encode the relevant aspects of the environment that would help them solve the spatial problem.” She added, “[They] did not have a consistent linguistic means to encode ‘left of’.”
This is a fascinating result, especially since the first group of adults were older and had been signing for a longer time. It’s clear evidence that our spatial reasoning skills depend, to an extent, on consistent spatial language. If we lack the right words, our mental abilities are limited in a way that extra life experience can’t fully compensate for. Even 30 years of navigating through the world won’t do the trick. . .
This is a subtly different idea than the one espoused by the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which suggests that different languages influence how speakers think about their world. By contrast, Pyers’ results focus “on those aspects of human cognition that are dependent on acquiring a language, any language”. She says that the room tasks tap into a set of mental skills that “crucially depends on language and that this relationship between language and spatial cognition should hold true for speakers of all languages”. . .
The grand idea behind all of these singular observations is that as human language evolved, our mental abilities became increasingly entwined with linguistic devices. Those devices are part and parcel of modern language, and thus modern thought. NSL, being a new language, is the exception that proves the rule – as it developed, so did the abilities of those who learned it, from their skills at visualising objects in space to their capacity for understanding the minds of their peers.
If you get a chance, I heartily recommend Oliver Sacks’ Seeing Voices, which made me cry. A voice is a terrible thing to be deprived of.
Update!
Language Log cover the story in some detail, adding helpfully:
. . . let’s not get carried away about the positive impact of “useful words”, the negative impact of “vacuous/fallacious words”, or any of the other common pop misintrerpretations of Sapir-Whorf. The relationship between language and thought, here and in general, is more subtle and complex than that.
And this (click to bigify and read the comments):
