Interesting ideas, but at this point seem a little outdated

You'll never look at cities, slime mold, facebook, etc. the same way again.

At Stanford there is (was?) a giant ant colony that has been studied and and compared to human society. The similarities of this ant colony to human society/cities will astound you. A must read for those of us who are constantly studying humans no matter our actual profession.

One of the origial books that got me thinking about digital differently. I had a hunch that these things are bigger and more wicked and complex than most people would talk about. He put it all in a book as a list of stories that show that many things are connected and that connected things are beautiful and can be more complex and evolving than one might think.

There are a few cognizant, telling- almost predictive views of media in the "future" (mainly the warning that extreme views thrive when media is targeted - helping to feed confirmation bias) however, most of the speculation feels extremely dated almost 20 years later.

Funny to have the chance to view the the technological / media landscape from the viewpoint of 2001 again.

Some would call me indecisive, fickle, foolish, or a good candidate for Ritalin, given my tendency to engage in many disciplines at once. Even now, with a masters degree in environmental science, I am plotting an eventual return to school for an MFA, or MBA, or MEd, or perhaps just some PhDs. I prefer to think of myself as a generalist, however, in the great tradition of cockroaches, crabgrass, Leonardo DaVinci and Jesse "The Body" Ventura. Indeed, I love finding connections between elements as seemingly unrelated as spineless arthropods and politicians (though perhaps that’s not the best example), and in turn to connect those connections with important issues and strategies for change.

Given my penchant for unusual logic, it was a no-brainer to revisit Steven Johnson’s Emergence: the connected lives of ants, brains, cities and software, published by Scribner Press in 2001. These organisms and objects do indeed have connected lives and relate as well to planning, community development, and citizen participation. The main connection, as the title suggests, is the concept of emergence, which Johnson defines as "what happens when you have a system of relatively simple-minded component parts—often there are thousands or millions of them—and they interact in relatively simple ways. And yet somehow out of all this interaction some higher level structure or intelligence appears, usually without any master planner calling the shots."

Ants create colonies that thrive by taking on specialized tasks, though there is no top-down control or even pre-programmed genetic instruction on how to do so. The Internet has grown to include millions of independent sites and connections without any grand plan for development and management. Slime mold cells aimlessly slither across the forest floor until they all suddenly, inexplicably join together and form one superorganism. The millions, perhaps billions of species on earth continue to evolve and specialize—one generation, one organism, one cell, or even one protein at a time. The phenomenon of emergence is as old as the universe itself and as young as each new website, instance of mitosis, or human decision. As much as humans like to hold themselves above the laws of physics and nature, urban development and other sophisticated endeavors are a matter of emergence as well. “While actual cities are heavily shaped by top-down forces, such as zoning laws and planning commissions,” Johnson writes, “scholars have long recognized that bottom-up forces play a critical role in city formation, creating distinct neighborhoods and other unplanned demographic clusters… Like any emergent system, a city is a pattern in time.”

In a sense, this theory bodes poorly for the planning field; we’ve worried for years that human skills and interactions may become obsolete with a rise in digital technology and robotics, but perhaps we will instead be replaced by a simple and ancient concept. If cities will self-construct, evolve, learn, and replicate without any help from master plans, government officials, zoning regulations and licensed planners (the horror!), then what good are visioning documents, charrettes, ballot initiatives, and public meetings? Resistance is futile, according to the wisdom of emergence and Star Trek, but could our tinkering go so far as to harm the development of communities we care so much about?

It is indeed unlikely that we can excuse ourselves from a phenomenon shaping the universe and everything in it. We can use emergence to our advantage, however, if we act a little less like planners and more like 19th Century Augustinian monks. Gregor Mendel spent hours examining pea plants in his garden and eventually came to realize that we are all products of natural selection. Rather than attempting to subvert the process, Mendel (and generations to follow) instead adopted it and adjusted it to further their own purposes. Artificial selection first gave us sheep with extra wool, then hardy varieties of corn and wheat, and now fruit programmed to ripen and blush in coordination with shipping schedules.

Johnson does not go into great depth on applications of emergence or the scientific and technical details behind it, but with a little creativity and commitment to systems thinking, we could begin to develop “artifical emergence” for the planning and citizen participation fields as web and software developers have done. Johnson says at the close of the book, “understanding emergence has always been about giving up control, letting the system govern itself as much as possible, letting it learn from the footprints.” If we can draw connections between the eBay community and our home towns, for example, we might develop a “community feedback” system to mirror the online “user feedback” system, which nearly-effortlessly improves the quality and consistency of eBay. If we can learn to see the similarities between ants and humans, we might find a way for cities to run and operate without the bureaucracy and top-down controls that dominate planning and management today. If we can stomach the idea that we are linked to slime mold, we might all learn to come together as well as the primitive cells that emerge as one from underneath our feet.

Read more reviews by the Orton Family Foundation in our Scenarios e-journal at http://www.orton.org/resources/public...

-Rebecca Sanborn Stone

I gave this book to my lab members shortly after it came out. A fascinating synthesis of ideas and examples that lead to a very powerful conclusion: highly complex phenomena can emerge from simple rules executed by multiple elements. A great read, and rich with implications for our lives and our world.

See my brief review of "Complexity: the emerging science at the edge of order and chaos". This book began to flesh out for me the fascinating area of emergence as a phenomenon. This shows how individual items (e.g. ants) combine to make a super-organism that 'has a mind of its own', and how in our human lives such a thing as a city emerges as the product less of planning than of dynamic interaction. Recommended as a fertile introduction to complexity theory and emergence.

Written in 2000 so parts are quite dated. But ants and slime mold still apply.

Nabeel Hamdi in his book on development constantly refers to the idea of emergence, which he draws from this book by Steven Johnson. Another bit of pop science applied to the world and I wasn't too sure I wanted to read it. Somehow I was convinced by its shortness, and the blurb from J.G. Ballard - 'Exhilarating'.

This is a bit Ballardian. Though it has no car crashes, sharp angles or sex symbol references.

In August 2000, Toshiyuki Nakagaki announced he had trained slime mould to travel the fastest route through a maze. Pretty amazing.

More amazing was that it turns out slime mould does not have a few cells that order all the rest around as had previously been assumed, but that given the right conditions, its components--often happily trawling about on their own doing what they do--each put out a call to join together and take advantage of opportunity and thus collectively do what they could not on their own. If you can use such human words to describe a very different process.

Which you probably shouldn't. Just as you probably shouldn't use that process as more than a broad metaphor to think about how things other than slime mould work, especially things as complicated as human beings.

So when this books was very broad I found it thought-provoking, and the narrower it got the higher my frustration.

I did like the breadth of what it drew on, going from slime mould to ants to Engels writing about Manchester - and I liked that it provoked me to think something slightly new about this classic with a quote I hadn't noted in my own reading:

I have never elsewhere seen a concealment of such fine sensibility of everything that might offend the eyes and nerves of the middle classes. And yet it is precisely Manchester that has been built less according to a plan and less within the limitations of official regulations--and indeed more through accident--than any other town. Still...I cannot help feeling that the liberal industrialists, the Manchester "bigwigs," are not altogether innocent of this bashful style of building. (37)

But Engels went on with Marx to look at some of the things structuring this apparent accident, principally capitalism and the exploitative hierarchies it creates. How some of this emergent behaviour interlocks with these structures is what is actually what I find most interesting, and discussing 'emergence' as though this emerging takes place on a blank canvas rather than into a world of structural inequality and oppression which act to shape it is deeply problematic. I would like a dialectical understanding of such things, how horizontal emergence articulates with structure. Maybe changes it for the better.

This book doesn't do that.

The fact that it doesn't do that makes it possible for Johnson to note hopefully that Al Gore is a fan of complexity theory! And in the same paragraph to describe corporate mantras of bottom-up intelligence and also the organising of the radical antiglobalization movement protest movement. Isn't it all fascinating.

The science stuff is fun though, like the fact that ant colonies follow a lifecycle over 15 years (well, Arizona carpenter ants do -- and I know those large bastards well with their amazing foraging lines that change every night, stripping a new plant of everything and leaving others alone). This, despite the fact no ant lives more than a year, thus the puzzle of:

The persistence of the whole over time--the global behaviour that outlasts any of its component parts--is one of the defining characteristics of complex systems. Generations of ants come and go, and yet the colony itself matures, grows more stable, more organized. (82)

This reminded me of the corruption and violence of the Yorkshire police in the Red Riding trilogy. But we are not ants. I like the fact that the Sim city game failed when the people were made too smart, instead they had to be dumbed down, fixated on one thing. Like ants.

Sim city may play with a form of emergence, but it is still limited by programming and the extent of its programmers imaginations of what cities are.

For most people, the sight of their first digital town sprouting upscale neighborhoods and chronically depressed slums is downright eerie, as though the hard math of the digital computer had somehow generated a life-form (88).

That was slightly infuriating, but I was raging as he continued in that vein:

Neighborhoods are themselves polycentric structures, born of thousands of local intersections, shapes forming within the city's larger shape. Like Gordon's ant colonies, or the cells of a developing embryo, neighborhoods are patterns in time. No one wills them into existence single-handedly; they emerge by a kind of tacit consensus : the artists go here, the investment bankers here, Mexican-Americans here, gays and lesbians here. The great preponderance of city dwellers live by these laws, without any legal authority mandating that compliance (91).

I did my PhD on this shit, and the multitude of books that tear this thinking into pieces are easily found in the case of the U.S. How dare he ignore years of racial covenants, and discrimination of all kinds, the immense amount of hate and violence that has gone into disciplining people of colour and people of different sexualities into their own neighbourhoods where at least they can feel safe.

Laws mandated compliance with racial segregation until 1953 in the US, the planning profession's obsession with homogeneity and separation of land-use has been policy for a hundred years, and unofficial policies and blatant discrimination still exist. We cannot forget the legacy of violence and issues with race and definitions of 'American' as white and etc. resulting from the conquest of the US and slavery that are even now being fought out in Ferguson and Baltimore and cities all over the country.

There is a lot more wrong with this idea, but in a nutshell: patterns do naturally emerge, but American cities at least do not reflect any such 'natural' patterns arrived at through tacit consensus. The idea would be laughable if it did not write off and deeply insult centuries of struggle by people of colour, poor people, lbgtqi communities to live where they choose with some level of dignity. That still hasn't been won.

This is why I hate using an idea emerging from slime mould, and other such biological marvels, to say 'this is how cities work.' To explain what is created by human beings. It simplifies and ignores what doesn't fit. Sadly our cities, our slums, our uprisings are all things we have actively created and fought over.

When do I like playing with an idea such as emergence? When it does not seek to explain, but rather shifts our frame, maybe makes us see things in a different way. Notice what we hadn't before. When metaphor opens up insight.

There are manifest purposes to a city...But cities have a latent purpose as well: to function as information storage and retrieval devices. Cities were creating user-friendly interfaces thousands of years before anyone even dreamed of digital computers. Cities bring minds together and put them into coherent slots. Cobblers gather near other cobblers...Ideas and goods flow readily within these clusters, leading to productive cross-pollination...The power unleashed by this data storage is evident in the earliest large-scale human settlements (108)

Again, still a bit problematic in its simplifications, but the idea of the city as a giant centre of information storage and retrieval is quite cool, fun to play with and think about.

I also liked the recognition that in studying communications and discourse these days, 'We need a third term beyond medium and message' (161). We need something that gets at how we are filtering things, accessing them. The web really has opened things wide up, but how are people being channeled, how do they figure out where to look and what is worth looking at?

Near the end Johnson gets to the question of what this can do for politics. Same issues as raised by what this can do for cities -- things aren't just emerging onto a level playing field so how emergence deals with existing structures of domination is the real question. That what makes its embrace by the right-wing who are anti-big-government in everything but the monopoly of force, and by the radical left so different.

In fact, the needs of most progressive movements are uniquely suited to adaptive, self-organizing systems: both have a keen ear for collective wisdom; both are naturally hostile to excessive concentrations of power; and both are friendly to change. For any movement that aims to be truly global in scope, making it almost impossible to rely on centralized power, adaptive self-organization may well be the only road available. (224)

Possibly true, but the capacity of capitalism to co-opt so much demands of us much more of a stretch in our thinking about how this actually can create a positive change in the world that goes to scale.

This was an okay book - parts 1 and 2 are worth reading. Part 3 is a speculation of how the Internet will impact our media, politics, etc. with a futurist's glimpse of AI and machine learning. That's because this was written in 2001, so part 3 is pure speculation...interesting only if you want a history lesson in what people expected from the future of software back in 2001.

Very interesting insights into emergent learning.