That's Capital

What Do You Speak? Where Are You From? To What Do You Belong?

For my money, the best reality television the past few weeks was on C-SPAN.  Namely, coverage of the immigration issues erupting all of a sudden. America's donor free/commercial free network has been much better than other television media in following the surprisingly robust rallies that seemed to erupt spontaneously across the nation.

Two weeks ago, 500,000 people marched in Los Angeles. Two weeks later, another 500,000 showed up to march in Dallas. Yesterday hundreds of thousands showed up for rallies in Washington DC, Seattle and New York, slowing down a range of industries depending on low paid labor across the nation.

The crowds have been overwhelming Latino, and in yesterday’s Washington D.C. event, the speakers were always bi-lingual. Sometimes English came first, other times second. But when Senator Ted Kennedy got up to speak, his Spanish translator was drowned out by crowds cheering without any need for the translation.

And when a nine-year old girl was featured on the podium to lead everyone in a “Pledge of Allegiance,” with all the American flags raised, it could have been a particularly emotional Fourth of July. But a weird one. Because even while they were holding up this nation's flag, there was a palpable connection to other countries.

A friend of mine in Seattle accidentally came upon her city’s rally, and told me how she found herself “thrilled,” more from the energy of the crowds as from the cause.

“I just start to think we’re all so apathetic and then you see this,” she told me. “I am not quite clear what we should do about open borders but the feeling in the crowd was great.”

C-SPAN doesn’t analyze news so much as show its formation. And so far I’ve yet to see much media analysis of the momentum of these crowds and insights about what, beyond the obvious, it might mean. It deserves more attention, specifically about mobilization in America today.

To me there was something clearly absent from the rallies: the voices of immigrants from outside of Latin America. Today I checked The New York Times for coverage, and found a front page photograph of a political rally full of folks who were clearly Asian. Then I read the caption and realized it was shot at an anti-government demonstration in Thailand.

While Mexicans dominate immigrant populations in the United States (approximately 49 percent of America’s 11 million “illegals”), where were the masses of non-Latino immigrants, whether originally from South America or South Asia?

In Minnesota, for example, the fastest growing group of foreign born are not from any Latin American country. They’re from Africa. In California, Spanish may be the second largest spoken language, but Mandarin, Korean and Farsi have their own substantial number of speakers.

But in the last few days, these rallies have been primarily Latino. Washington D.C. has over 70,000 Ethiopians. What would have happened had the speeches been in English and Amharic? How might that have impacted the cause? What does it suggest about the cause that Spanish is so overwhelming its language?

More about that in the near future. This post will focus less on the “cause” than how it’s been waged. I have spent the last six posts wrestling with issues around developing infrastructure, specifically how collectives of people can commit to something together, and how other parts of their lives (their rituals) play a part in that process. 

The entire immigrant issue is a great reflection of the limits and opportunities of mass action. And also how, in our modern world, identity gets played out among a public collective. The ability of Latin Americans to organize so quickly seems so relevant - especially the activism from a particular demographic among them, the Mexicans.

In the last 15 years, Mexicans have been building populations in states ranging from North Carolina to Wisconsin to New York. But except in border states like Texas and California, up till now they were awfully quiet politically and socially. These past two weeks they have emerged with an intensity which demonstrates equal measures of longing and ambition. That emergant-type energy has implications for all of us.

Think of the crowds. Half a million people at a time. These were folks for whom a day off means losing critical wages.  Demonstrating for them was no lark. I guess you could say that these rallies are proof that fear can be a great force to galvanize action. But I bet fear also prevented a lot of African, Chinese, and South Asians from joining the protests.

In fact, the pride with which people spoke their native Spanish suggested that while feeling vulnerable, these are not a group who feel marginalized to the shadows. Or, more accurately, perhaps they had suddenly caught the full extent of their potential power.

What did they have that helped them? Three things seemed apparent. First, they had the memories of where they came from, expressed in the passion and pleasure with which they chanted together in Spanish. Secondly, they had affiliation with a church, Catholic or born-again Christian.

Finally, they hold the threads of a emerging sense of what they want. Not the entire fabric. Rather, they have a vision in the making. Something about opportunity and home which is expressed in the form of a green card. Together, these shared institutions of language, church and legal document gave them the generative DNA of meaning, ritual, and place.

Collective meaning is the first step in creating infrastructure. It allows the building of trust, which in turn lead to rituals centered around place. These two pieces, ritual and place, then work together to reaffirm meaning and trust. And perhaps the tensions around yearning, the act of working towards something, then takes on a creative force of its own.

The immigrants who came to Washington may not have organized previously, but their lives lend themselves to organically building a cultural infrastructure which is transforming into a political force. They gather for work together, they room together, they spend a lot of time together.

They also have a model to base themselves on. It's called the Christian Right. Whether or not you're a fan, that is a group who have turned cultural concerns into a political infrastructure that's been amazingly resilient. For the last two decades, they have been brilliantly leveraging place and ritual. It is a lack of place and ritual that eludes liberals. Outside of visiting Starbucks, what do they have? Not much.

In New York, for instance, the middle class move to private schools (when they can afford it) has robbed the city of its most potent advocates for better public education. Against the war in Iraq?  Well, the military is primarily composed of a population of Southern and Mid-Western white recruits.  As the brilliant (and ignorantly criticized) Robert D. Kaplan writes, they are forming an unacknowledged caste.

Because of a decreasing lack of regular attachments in the public sphere, moderates, liberals and even elites in this country, however “well educated” are effectively voiceless politically. Every four years many of us start arguing who will make a better president, but between elections that process is dead.

It's not multiple identities that weaken political action. It's lack of regular, conscious and, very important, public ways to partake in those identities. And to wrestle with them.

For the last few weeks, I have been writing about a gaming mentality that has impacted this country, and perhaps the world. I wonder whether living in game spaces can lead people to question power and then impact it. Perhaps these immigrants are proving you can.

Certainly people play in games. But part of that play is "trying on" identities. Then they adopt pieces of them or they move on. Sometimes such a process can remind us where our most resonant sympathies live.

Look at sport. As a friend told me about visiting East Germany before the destruction of the wall, outside any local soccer games you would always see at least half a dozen tanks. Soldiers would follow the departing crowd till it would disperse. For good reason.

British soccer crowds, fueled by class-based aggression and too much beer, can be furiously destructive at home and abroad. Fired up, they are an identity in drunken emergence, expressing themselves with careless abandon.

For a haunting example of another type of crowd in emergence, remember the figure whose lone actions nearly caused a revolution in China. Nicknamed Tankman in Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government have spent the last 20 years doing their best to vanquish his memory. Give a group of people a place sense to learn (or be reminded of) its power and... well, watch out.

The Mexican "illegals" demonstrating yesterday were so interesting to me because they seemed as they as much in the midst of an internal as well as an external struggle. You could see it and hear it as they momentarily looked proud, then uneasy, then excited.

It was as if, in those moments of joining a demonstratin, they were coalescing as a collective, navigating their way into "becoming" something other than what they had been. Illegals to citizens. Mexicans to Americans. But also fighting to retain something else that they could not leave behind.

I'm not sure they are yet clear what they ultimately want. But their willingness to dive into figuring it out makes them a force. Those rallies were game spaces to claim a complex identity. And it's that conflicting journey, a process that they travel with passion but also discipline, traversing "the system" into prominence, balancing who they have been, are, and want to be... that can make them particularly effective players in the modern public sphere.

Because if these marches are a series of game spaces for them, for now they are using each space wisely. Taking each seriously. And for now they are managing it without the rootless violence of soccer fans from Liverpool, or frustrated Muslims around the world, whose institutions right now serve them no further than theirs bars, mosques or privacy of their homes.

We native born-Americans have our own rootlessness. Which is not a problem until we ignore it. Why? Because as fewer of us share rituals connected to "public space," we have fewer connections to the "public good." Such rituals and spaces don't need to be heavy. Or serious. Think of national holidays. The one day a year that the mass of us share with real joy is Thanksgiving.

That may be unfair. People interact with their neighbors. Parents around the country certainly socialize with other parents, looking after their children. And America has always had a transitory "moving on" attitude which provides oxygen to the national psyche.

But any existing (or even healthy) restlessness is probably amplified by fears around globalization. We are, to increasing degrees, creating gated communities. Which reinforce the ability to personalize private space at the expense of the public.

Here. Let me take a leap: however heavily accented their English, anyone in yesterday’s crowd of Latin Americans was probably more capable of shaping the direction of this country than many of us who were born here, especially a non-married, childless blogger like me.

Without strong emotional ties to larger real world collectives, a person is an individual in the most negative sense. Alone. It’s why the buying power of straight, single Americans as a demographic will never translate into political power. Especially single straight men.

Gay men and single women don't have the rich social ties generated by children but, so long as they face perceived discrimination, they do have cause.  They are actively navigating roles. Even that is fading as they rise in status.

Those "illegals" marching belong to larger communities which are actively in emergence. They have a cause that's not simply about discrimination. It's a shared identity about a journey that was visible (and audible) watching them on C-SPAN.

You could see it in their complex ability to juggle English and Spanish. You could sense the memories of what they left but also what they seek. It was in their eyes as well as the words from their mouth and heart.

They may not have deep roots in this country, but they have connections to institutions whose roots run very deep, are rooted in place, yet extend beyond simple concepts of geography: church, ancestral home and... seeking to create someplace they can someday claim as home.

As useful as the web can be to create collectives like “My Space,” we still live in an atom based world. Gravity matters. Nothing is more proof of that than seeing the gathering of these crowds of immigrants.  In today's world, if you're not religious (even if its the religion of the secular), and can't collectively share a sense of memory as well as longing, you will find yourself more and more isolated.

Advice to moderates and liberals, find your own offline institutions with places and rituals that support and nuture things you hold dear. The conservatives have them. Radicals (right or left) tend to be utopian and create their own. The only other adult group I'd say are the haplessly deluded who believe they need neither, outside of holding on to avoiding any commitment which may end in loss.

Finally, while my comment about Starbucks may have seemed flippant, the truth is I think potential rituals and places will (or can be) inevitably be rooted in brands. Businesses with whom we form conscious and unconscious relationships. Markets exist as much as to reflect as to reinforce values.  Those brands operate in markets that can impact their success or failure.

There’s an email making the rounds right now, for instance, about fighting high oil prices. It suggests a focused boycott of ExxonMobil, action which would ask drivers to spend several months actively avoiding purchases from this business' gas stations. It points out a “don’t buy gas day" would be of limited impact. Rather, target this powerful brand with behavior which takes a cumulative toll over a period of months rather than one day.

It would certain transform a weekly (daily?) chore of "filling up" from a drag to a statement. It would, in fact, ritualize it. Give it meaning. And if you don't think gas stations can offer rituals around a place, come to New York City's Houston and Lafayette, where cabbies hang out at the car wash.

Can your local ExxonMobil-alternative help you create such a ritual by creating a relationship with you? Do you have a relationship with the folks where you buy fuel? Can you convince the franchisees who pay their money to headquarters to threaten to make their own switch? Worth a try.

For my money, I say the boycott should be less about prices and more about energy choices: pushing Exxon to invest a healthy portion of its profits in R&D on alternative fuels. And lobbying the government to use our tax dollars to do the same. Cheaper gas to me is just... cheaper gas. It further extends our willful ignorance about how disconnected we are to our resources.

Regardless, an e-mail generated boycott is an interesting outgrowth.  Perhaps America’s politically charged and multi-lingual immigrants are teaching the rest of us a lesson. It pays to speaks to a few languages, be flexible in one’s identity, and, not least, be ready to join with others to commit to something you believe in. To put a stake in the ground that says, I am here with you. We belong.

by Jonathan Field

Bits of a Puzzle - Part V

A friend of mine called last week. He hadn’t been in touch for a bit. Apparently, he had fallen in love with a woman he only sees on weekends. He's in New York. She's in Chicago. When he's not with her, all he does is think about her.

“It’s amazing how powerful a hold she has,” he told me. “I’m out having beer with friends and all I can do is wonder what she’s doing when I’m not around. I catch a scent of a perfume that reminds me of her and I’m completely undone.”

A magazine sales guy whose one marriage ended quickly almost 15 years ago, he’s fairly sophisticated but also fairly cynical. Now he is walking around considering that phrases like “true love” might not be hype.

“When she’s here, we stay in bed, like it seems for hours," he said. "But it’s not the sex. It’s something bigger. I hate to use this word but it’s “deep” but then she goes back to Chicago and doesn’t call and I feel like a… like a woman. It makes me want to hit someone. Or hide underneath the bed. This is insane.”

In poet’s terms, my friend has momentarily gone mad. In evolutionary psychology’s terms, he is experiencing limerance. A state of being which mixes sexual and emotional longing, it’s what makes being around obsessed lovers so annoying.

When not in each other’s arms, they’re “neither here nor there.”  Visible to the eyes, such lovers are emotionally unavailable outside their “couplet.” Not simply blind to all around them, they actually demand an exhausting type of attention – intense periodic acknowledgments about the heights of their state of being. Or, equally annoying, the lows.

According to evolutionary psychologists, limerance is composed of equal measures of pain and pleasure – the balance creating a sense of the sublime. The pleasure is the promise of feeling as if you are merging with another being, becoming one. The pain is the dread of rejection, humiliation not just in another’s eyes but those of the community. The merging is not quite there, and perpetually in threat of coming to completion.

It’s an intoxicating brew, and anyone within its orbit will either feel a sense of transcendence or as if they’d fallen into a black hole. Regardless, in both cases there’s a sense of losing agency. The gods of passion guide you.

It's as if romance has a life of its own. And though we don't admit it, that's often that what makes it so thrilling. Whether you’re a participant or simply concerned friend, entering limerance gives the sense of being in thrall to powers beyond individual control. 

After repeated reminders to my friend that he lives a charmed life, and that if it doesn’t work out that he was fine before he met this woman, I ended up hanging up on him during a long harangue from him that “nobody understands.” I felt bad but limerance is a game space where if you’re not a player, don’t step into the ring.

The way to “get a grip” over limerance? Send them emails. Buy flowers. Or tough it out... go to the gym and sweat it out. As with all difficult or powerful human emotions, people control it through creating rituals. Behaviors that can give shape to shapeless feelings. Limerance, like any strong emotion, has spawned its own markets around particular rituals, from reading love stories to romantic get-aways.

Humans create rituals, in general, to create order from chaos. Think of a family’s Sunday meal, where everyone sits together to break bread. That meal is the flag that family flies to say, “this dinner together is who we are,” even if the rest of the week they rush around as if they barely know each other.

Rituals are particularly fertile in areas like romance, where conditions are apt to change at any moment, leaving a lot of vulnerability in its wake. Markets depend on ritual behavior, feeding needs that are constant yet always susceptible to the threat of unstable forces (i.e. energy supplies, hurricanes, war, etc.).

Indeed, markets serve rituals. They exist to create stability in an unstable world, whether around food, education, whatever. Commerce allows us to survive, not simply in the short run for day to day supplies, but psychically, delivering us the emotional security that there are others who share our needs and can help us serve them.

Money is the DNA of commerce, providing the symbols of stability. But at core, money itself is a bit like romance, something that is in perpetual and uncontrollable formation. Mark Taylor, who we interviewed here at That’s Capital, writes in his book Confidence Games that money is, itself, liminal, a state of being “betwixt and between.”

If that seems abstract, consider the whirl of emotions around getting a monetary gift, the lovely imagined possibilities it inspires along with the accompanying tensions of wanting to maximize its value.

Money may seem fixed in coin or paper, but within it swim a set of “in between” forces whose shapelessness (and perpetual movement) give them a power that will influence all those who come in to contact. Like romance, it too seems to have a life of its own. Which again, like romance, makes it attractive and dangerous.

The liminal space around money is geography that resounds with contradictions.  There's a perpetual sense that money can either deliver cause for dread… or cheer. Booyah! Whether winning or losing, a small object like a coin or a bill has so much power over the course of our lives. An object whose value can go up or down, the logic not always clear.

Facilitating commerce, money allows us to transcend limitations of time and space, literally and figuratively. It both symbolizes (reflects back to us) and generates (storing it for later use) different types of value – moral, social and physical. As much as we want these values to be permanent, they are by their nature temporary. Always in flux.  Reflecting a world that is similarly unstable.

As all relationships are a constant series of overt or less overt negotiations, even while we use money to create stability, its stability is constantly undercut by the ongoing negotiation within these relationships, a bit like the value of flowers within romance. Think of week old roses looming there after a lover's quarrel. The stability that money creates is always temporary. Its direction can always turn.

Taylor’s Confidence Games is named for the trickster aspects of money and commerce. But reading the book you don’t get the sense that Taylor feels betrayed by money. Rather, for him the delusions of stability that money feeds may nurture fundamental spiritual as well as physical needs.

A currency’s value hides forces that are as powerful as they are abstract. Within solid-looking paper bills flow forces that are eternally liquid and often impossible to understand, mirroring the mystery of life.

It's not only that we can't always understand things such as why or when it's going to rain; neither can we fathom all the reasons people do things that impact us. As in romance, where we are rarely clear about why we are in love or why someone loves us, the forces that determine monetary value are often terrifyingly incomprehensible.

While humans may fear such mystery, we also probably cherish a vessel like money to contain it. Money captures the mystery which we don't want to acknowledge as basic to life. And yet it also exists, to some extent, to remind us of that mystery. It's a safe space to consider creative forces that impact us and almost seem to have their own intelligence.

Capturing those forces, money generates responses that are  in a dance of constant opposition. First, again like romance, money demands enormous faith. A trust in the permanence of its existence. A suspension of disbelief, precisely because its operating in a place that suggest rules even as it subverts them. 

But second, as in any area of liminality, money also breeds lots of obsessive thought. Thinking (like this post), which sometimes lead to profound intellectual breakthroughs (can't promise that here, but think of figures from Calvin to Karl Marx), that give us new takes on life and how we should live it.   

Okay, let’s back up. My last post explored the way recent social and economic changes are reflected in entertainment shifts, specifically the ritual of "going to the movies" has been eclipsed by playing games, at least so far as revenues and involvement.

The game space is far from liminal. In fact, it’s rule and structure bound. Actually, so are movies. But the difference between the two suggests something to do with limerance and the liminal, as well as our present and future.

Movies focus on emotional catharsis. The pleasure is about watching a hero move towards forming some new psychic or emotional state. Heroes transform fixed situations (places, people, things), and in the process are transformed and elevated themselves.

The pleasure of games has little to do with the emotional catharsis of watching someone else’s journey. The joy is found in the pleasure and obsession of identifying patterns, leveraging them, and creating new ones. And unlike the movie space, where the stories are seamless and big, the game space is about perpetually short-term engagements. 

To win means a momentary transformation. Nobody wins forever. And this is where the liminal emerges as a cloudy presence. Games demand a sense of liminality, because they focus so much on rules. By telling us what we need to do, they suggest a lack of rules (or changing rules) outside their boundaries. 

Here's a thought. The popularity of games may reflect a deep philosophic shift within our culture. Namely this: the millennial world has moved beyond beliefs in the absolute reality posed by most religions. The rise of religious fundamentalism, itself, acknowledges a terror of this shift, a desire for a return to stable values. Which probably were never all that stable.

But humans can't live without values. Meaning is what makes us human. For the past century, modernism and faith in scientific progress propelled the development of government institutions, but also the organization of business (things like brands). Then very briefly, and to a much lesser extent, post-modernism emerged, a sense that reality is inherently corrupt because all meaning is tightly controlled by those in power.   

Gaming reflects a world-view that is simultaneously less trusting in ultimate answers but also less gloomy about their absence. The gaming attitude suggests that life is best lived by provisional truths. And lived within a reality that, like games, take place in shaped spaces. These spaces may periodically change, but participants within the space can agree upon provisional rules to change them.

And it’s here that games share similar qualities with romance and money, at least around the “liminal.” Because, while humans may act as if they have control in these spheres, there’s an  unspoken acceptance that these spaces will morph.

Unlike a movie world, where we sign off with an ominipotent “the end” (as if God has signaled it) a game world is a series of humanly-shaped rules and spaces. The rules may seem fixed, but we can change them, play differently, or we can always move on.

Encouraging immersive as opposed to voyeuristic experiences, games assume an experience is only provisionally real. Outside of the territory of the game’s space, its rules are irrelevant. You either stay in one game space, enter others, or accept chaos. 

Not surprisingly, games are a place where faith is almost as important as skill, at least in those where “lady luck” has a hand.  As opposed to a movie era where stability focused on the promise of something eternal (like a job that lasted one’s life, or a community that stood strong), what it takes to win is frequently shaky. Difficult to decipher.

At the same time, games are more accepting of failure. If you lose, you go on to another game. Recently, a column by Maureen Dowd satirized Harvard students flocking to classes about happiness. But in a game world, happiness is a critical value. Because if you’re not happy on the journey, the destination promises no ultimate reward. The joy is brief, taking up time than it took to get there.

This post, like the previous four others, is part of a longer examination of infrastructure, exploring how things like national transportation systems or business organizations like brands are impacted by technological and social shifts. Ultimately, I’m looking at how we live impacts… how we live.

Well, honestly, I’m both near the end and far from it. Before I reconnect this back let me return to exploring the liminal aspects of money and commerce, or the patterns of which they're composed and, in turn, inspire.

History, in Taylor’s book Confidence Games, is an ongoing tango between man, money and commerce, the process binding us inextricably (and eternally) to a set of higher powers – whether “the gods,” “God,” or in modern times, things like “market forces” or “corporate capitalism.”

Taylor’s focus is on how we, at various points in history, have found ways to navigate our role in the dance. It follows how, in such navigation, we created powerful belief systems reflected in religion, art, and science. He looks at everything from Calvin’s liberation of bourgeoisie merchants to conduct business while remaining true to God, to modern arts’ impact on Wall Street. 

The book points to the way commerce and money, and by extension technology, have always played an enormous part in evolving belief systems, for science as well as religion. In fact, reading this book, you get the sense that the most important belief systems are as frequently generated as tested within the sphere of commerce, money and technology.

In Taylor’s view, they create arenas that have historically been viewed as simultaneously liberating and dangerous.  Tracing the emergence of markets, he points out that they were initially viewed not so much as neutral as special spaces, arenas to be approached with a sense of awe.

Set off at the edges of towns, they were accorded their own particular sets of rules and regulations. Market participants were required to express vows or prayers on entrance, and they were centers of ritual, both serious and festive.

Today markets and commerce have their own rituals vows and mystery. Think of trying to figure out real estate prices. Or the stock market. Money, as Taylor suggests, is becoming ever more ethereal or abstract.

Look at Wall Street, where so-called “traders” make a living “playing” stocks and derivatives based on anything from biotechnology companies making no profit to taking hedges on weather patterns like hurricanes.

In millennial America it would be more accurate than flippant to say that the only difference between an illegal and legal bookie is the different authorities who tax them, the former paying up to other mobsters and the latter to the IRS.

And regardless of which authority to whom you bow, the rules of transparency are cover for processes that are deeply opaque. Where once we depended upon the gods for guidance, today we have digital technology, capable of crunching numbers but also perpetually evaluating future scenarios. 

Regardless, both the gods and our computers require the filtering of human mediation in whom we desperately want accountability but on whom we more usually simply ascribe faith.  Equally important, as with romance and money, digital technology is itself in constant emergence. Like them, it has a generative power that suggests possessing a life force of its own.

At the moment when we think we have the ability to customize our lives through the seeming ability to personalize everything from how we shop to how we work (our constellation of "bytes), digital technology only reinforces our perception that there are forces much bigger us with whom we must co-exist.

The sense of mystery continues to surround us. Because the technology upon which we depend is  doing great things, but we don't know how it does them. And even if you don't believe in evolution, as long as you use anything digital you live in a world that is evolving before your eyes.

Since infrastructure is the human effort to build stable systems, and our current technology as well as our belief systems are not just subject to liminal conditions, but reinforce them, well... pray there are no hurricanes in your neighborhood. Big government, a sector many of us once depended upon to save us, may be as much a relic of the 20th century as the movies. Or just irrelevant.

Rather than looking for leaders to lead us, it may be smarter to find collectives creating rituals that serve things in which you believe. From religious or political groups to your local book club to folks who play poker or Everquest. It won't solve the big problems like education or energy policy, but it may offer access to like-minded parties with whom to face shaky times.

And then again, can networks of mophing collectives really confront things like depletions of oil or global warming?  More to come. 

END OF FORMAL POST
by Jonathan Field

A few more notes: Thinking about rituals, movies from the beginning were immediately ritualistic. You went to a theater. You were part of a crowd. The ritual included a range of broader things (buying popcorn) to things that were personalized (sitting in a certain part of the theater, getting there for the previews, avoiding the previews, etc.). In times when we watch more movies via DVD, the mass ritual is disappearing. The game space has its own rituals, but because there are many more types of games, they are less easy to identify the patterns en masse.

For books on emergence, read Steven Johnson’s book by that name, or John H. Hollands'.  More immediately, think of the way Amazon makes recommendations based upon past sales. This is bottom-up technology, constantly taking in algorithms to calibrate the way incremental movements will end up creating a new structure or pattern. A universe of real-time data is interesting, and very valuable to business or political organizations. But as individuals, without interface mediation, it's awfully difficult for humans to make sense of. Steven Johnson's book on the importance of interface design today is something anybody interested in business or politics should read. It's brilliant.

Finally, my phrase "provisional reality," and its importance were inspired by conversations with my brother-in-law Philip Simmons, who fought Lou Gehrig's disease for nine years before he died in 2002, beating odds that said he'd be dead within two. He also managed to write three books in that time, one of them - Learning to Fall - managed to win some critical acclaim. His book Deep Surfaces, which I believe is out of print, is worth grabbing if you ever find it.