Category Archives: community design

Today’s Academic Counterfactual Cultural Exploration (ACCE™)

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I had the plea­sure (and honor) of vis­it­ing Jason Moore’s lab at Dart­mouth ear­lier this week, and giv­ing a lit­tle sem­i­nar ver­sion of some­thing big I’ve been work­ing on for the last a few months. More about that project in a few days; the visit helped clar­ify a num­ber of open ques­tions and focus atten­tion where it was needed.

This was my first “real” visit to an aca­d­e­mic envi­ron­ment in a few years—the sort where I’m not just lurk­ing in the back­ground and hang­ing out with my tenure-​​track friends. Indeed, the last time I did some­thing like this I think it was my 2008 visit to Nic McPhee at the Uni­ver­sity of Min­nesota at Mor­ris. Like Jason, Nic was also nice and help­ful, but UM Mor­ris a qual­i­ta­tively dif­fer­ent aca­d­e­mic cul­ture from that of the med­ical school at Dart­mouth. Both times I vis­ited mainly to observe the local work cul­tures, espe­cially look­ing at the col­lab­o­ra­tive net­work that con­nects stu­dents, fac­ulty and staff—within and between their respec­tive labs, depart­ments, dis­ci­plines and institutions.

I’ve been build­ing a cat­a­log of cul­tural and insti­tu­tional rou­tines and obsta­cles that side-track—and (often per­ma­nently) delay—potentially valu­able projects that could oth­er­wise be explored quickly. The same old ques­tion I always ask, more or less: What do you wish you had more resources to pursue?

Recently I’ve found a use­ful way to explore these rou­tines and obsta­cles is to dis­cuss lit­tle coun­ter­fac­tual sce­nar­ios and see what bub­bles to the sur­face. It can be an inter­est­ing way to sur­face trans­gres­sive behav­ior with­out actu­ally, you know, try­ing it out in real life.

Here’s a vari­ant that came to me as I stared out an air­plane win­dow recently:

Sup­pose a highly-​​respected but soon-​​to-​​retire researcher in Com­pu­ta­tional Phys­i­ol­ogy vis­its the salient depart­ment at Large Ivy Uni­ver­sity to give a sem­i­nar. As one comes to expect from a late-​​career lumi­nary, her talk tends a bit towards the philo­soph­i­cal, but it brings up a num­ber of inter­dis­ci­pli­nary ques­tions and uncon­ven­tional approaches to the con­struc­tion, use and study of Com­pu­ta­tional Phys­i­o­log­i­cal sys­tems. There’s a lot to think about, and a lot of mate­r­ial that most main­stream col­leagues just don’t run into very often.

After her sem­i­nar, she spends a day or two vis­it­ing her Host’s lab and a few of his col­le­gial LIU labs, chat­ting with staff, stu­dents, junior fac­ulty, and their var­i­ous Prin­ci­pal Inves­ti­ga­tors about their ongo­ing research and tech­nol­ogy, and com­par­ing notes on the inter­est­ing things that folks in other insti­tu­tions and dis­ci­plines have been doing.

As it devel­ops, she takes an inter­est in one of the ideas a grad­u­ate stu­dent brings up in pass­ing. The idea isn’t a part of the student’s the­sis research, nor is it even salient to the funded projects in any of the LIU Comp Phys labs. But it’s a good idea, and she decides it would be fas­ci­nat­ing to see how it would play out, and (even bet­ter) it’s a purely com­pu­ta­tional project that the vis­it­ing scholar real­izes could be done in a few weeks… by an agile team of soft­ware devel­op­ers. It wouldn’t need a grant or even a long plan­ning or pro­posal process to see what happens.

Nei­ther LIU nor the visitor’s home insti­tu­tion has any­thing like an “agile team of soft­ware devel­op­ers” as a component—hah! Not even a lit­tle bit. But in her increas­ing time spent “out in the world”, the vis­i­tor has actu­ally run into folks who have worked in those envi­ron­ments, and started to see the point of the var­i­ous “agile val­ues and practices”—at least as a kind of Utopian ideal.

Mind you, this idea isn’t any­thing com­mer­cial. But it’s a damned inter­est­ing project, and to be frank it would be a pity to see it delayed until the stu­dent grad­u­ates, and fin­ishes her post-doc(s), and gets done with tenure track, and so on and on.…

So the vis­i­tor chats online with a few peo­ple she knows, and they agree the project as sketched is a fea­si­ble way to spend about a month of work. Obvi­ously the stu­dent should have the lion’s share of aca­d­e­mic (and other!) credit if it goes for­ward. But the agile folks she chats with remind her that the point of the “one team” prac­tice is that the stu­dent prob­a­bly needs to be co-​​located with the team doing the work with her.

Alas, the stu­dent has a the­sis com­mit­tee meet­ing com­ing up shortly. She’s been asked by her com­mit­tee to work over the draft bib­li­og­ra­phy and bring it more in line with the stan­dards expected in the high-​​impact jour­nals in the field: get rid of those weird ref­er­ences from graph the­ory and ecol­ogy papers and add more from the mod­ern Comp Phys lit­er­a­ture, for example.

Noth­ing like this project has ever been in any of the Comp Phys jour­nals. It may not even catch on in the com­mu­nity, com­pared with the more obvi­ously recep­tive audi­ence over in Arti­fi­cial Men­ta­tion. But the AM folks have never even con­sid­ered Comp Phys as a domain where their stuff might be use­ful. It’s a blue-​​sky project, in that sense.

What has to hap­pen to get this work done? Does the stu­dent leave for a month? Does every­body wait until “it’s safe”? Does the student’s advi­sor col­lab­o­rate with the vis­i­tor on a grant, and use the funds to (even­tu­ally) fund an in-​​house (and almost cer­tainly inag­ile) devel­op­ment project that will take sev­eral years to do what might hap­pen in a month under other circumstances?

Who gets credit? The vis­i­tor wants the stu­dent to get essen­tially all of it. Does the student’s advi­sor get some? Under what circumstances?

Who gives per­mis­sion? Who needs to give per­mis­sion? The stu­dent should be work­ing on her the­sis. The advi­sor should be see­ing to his student’s pro­fes­sional track. And so on.

Who is a risk? What sort of risk?

A Cnut of the Apocalypse

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It’s been a few years now that Bar­bara and I have been lis­ten­ing to books on CD as we fall asleep. Usu­ally a chap­ter at a time, unless we, umm… you know, retire early. We’re lucky to have a well-​​stocked pub­lic library, with a lot of works by excel­lent and engag­ing lec­tur­ers who aren’t too whiny or hes­i­tant. And (thank good­ness) not all of them are about Greece and Rome.

I mean we haven’t avoided Greece and Rome; nobody can. We’ve had our share of Great Men, Great Philoso­phers, Emper­ors, Tyrants, the world accord­ing to Thucy­dides and Plutarch. Even the “periph­eral” [flag that word for a moment, please] his­to­ries we lis­ten to—the Celts, Asia Minor, Persia—and the off-​​brand facets his­to­ries like the Ara­bic Sci­en­tists and the Enlight­en­ment and stuff always touch on Greece and Rome, democ­racy and empire. Wind, fire, all that kind of thing.

Maybe it’s osmo­sis, or maybe it’s some­thing more akin to repeated slaps on the fore­head with a rolled-​​up scroll while broadly mouthing “LOOK AT THIS AGAIN”, but I’m start­ing to notice some­thing I never saw before. Like any nerd, I grew up learn­ing about Greece from brightly col­ored mythol­ogy books, and Rome out of Spar­ta­cus and such. Our Social Stud­ies classes were all about 1970s Patri­o­tism tinged by that 1950s Dewey-​​would-​​lose-​​against-​​Marx Cold War cit­i­zen­ship stew and ped­a­gog­i­cal style our teach­ers were raised up in. The Found­ing Fathers read about Greece and Rome, inspired by the democ­ra­cies of Athens and the repub­lic of Rome, blah blah. So maybe one needs to have been slapped on the fore­head a few dozen times with the actual his­tory before that patina of received wis­dom starts to crack.

Viz: it wasn’t that simple.

Now any actual his­to­rian will prob­a­bly be mak­ing the Wry Smile Eye-​​rolling Face now. But of course most of us well-​​educated liberal-​​thinking tech­ni­cal folks don’t bother too much, no mat­ter how earnestly and effi­ciently we pur­sue knowl­edge, to dive down the rat-​​hole of Nar­ra­tive Construction.

It all starts with Egypt, of course. I remem­ber as a Junior High stu­dent I would get up at 6am (for some rea­son) and watch a tele­vi­sion class about Egypt­ian art on some broad­cast Cleve­land TV sta­tion. And you know they men­tion this Ptolemy dude, either the Emperor (wait, Egypt didn’t have Emper­ors, it had Pharaohs) or the Astronomer Who Was Very Wrong (wait, were there Astronomers or just Astrologers before Coper­ni­cus?), and it grad­u­ally sinks in and it’s only decades later that some other tid­bit or two falls into place and Whoa whoa hang on, that was Greek no I mean Mace­don­ian I mean Hel­lenis­tic stuff, and Egypt was the south­west­ern Alexan­drine empire, and—hang on—so the Romans were deal­ing with the rem­nants of Alexander’s empire?! and so on. Strands con­geal, like DNA pre­cip­i­tat­ing in an Eppen­dorf tube (hey, that’s my heritage).

And then Whoa, hang on again—so all those let­ters from Bible dudes and Greek Philoso­phers and Geome­ters were from Turkey?! and then But but the “demo­c­ra­tic” Athe­ni­ans were total ass­holes and thank good­ness Alexan­der came along and… well, and so on. Call it “provin­cial­ism giv­ing way slightly to pay­ing atten­tion”, or maybe “nar­ra­tive recon­fig­u­ra­tion”, depend­ing on your background.

Clearly it isn’t that his­tory is writ­ten by the win­ners, but rather that they write and dis­trib­ute the Cliff’s Notes.

OK. That’s the setup. Here’s one point: Seems as though the writ­ers’ guide­lines for Cliff’s Notes demand Clear Sep­a­rat­ing Bound­aries. Starts and End­ings. First there was Egypt where they had mum­mies, then there was Greece where peo­ple were Demo­c­ra­tic, then there was Rome with fuzzy hel­mets and brass skirts, then there was (in advanced classes) Byzan­tium [sic] which was pretty for­eign and dis­si­pated like Paris or some­thing, then after a bit over there you get your King Arthur, and then after a while some­body turns on the lights and we get tele­scopes and gun­pow­der, and here we are. Nice clean starts and fin­ishes, all along the way, like dinosaurs being wiped out so lit­tle furry mam­mals can turn into Balu­chith­erium [sic] and stuff.

Surely there’s a name for this fal­lacy. “Con­sec­u­tivism” maybe? “Dis­cretism”? It is a fal­lacy, clearly; I’ve been hang­ing around a half-​​hour a day with actual his­to­ri­ans, the sort who sound as if they fling their arms around as they read, and they’ve man­aged to get choco­late in my peanut but­ter all over the place: Greeks in my Egypt, and [Greek!] Asia Minor in my Rome, and Celts in the Bible, and Per­sians in my Sparta, and cats and dogs liv­ing together.

And thence: Self-​​definition is all about the bound­aries. Insert a cunningly-​​crafted keen insight about bound­aries here, one that touches on all the expected things about brain­wash­ing, self-​​definition, provin­cial­ism, cul­tural pride, homo­gene­ity and diver­sity, ingroups and out­groups, wind, fire, all that kind of thing. Shorter ver­sion: “Hey, you know those are just Cliff’s Notes you’re read­ing, right?”

All this? All this was crys­tal­lized into an anas­ta­mos­ing tis­sue of rant because I just read Alexis Madri­gal talk­ing about the awful awful things that have hap­pened in our Amer­i­can cul­ture and the grow­ing dichotomy and the wor­ries every­body in pub­lic pol­icy expresses all the time about jobs and decline and inequal­ity.

It makes me sad, every time I see this sort of thing. Sad because of the box it grows within. It’s the provin­cial Star­tups Will Restore Us box, the Eco­nomic Devel­op­ment box, the one dec­o­rated with fine print that counts how many jobs (asses in office chairs!) and Press Releases From Tech Spin­offs (young peo­ple are the only ones who ever do any­thing inter­est­ing!) and with a star-​​shaped brass sticker that reads “Now with 25% more EARNEST HOPE!”

This box is a spe­cial kind of con­ser­vatism. Burke would rec­og­nize it, because it’s all about not break­ing things. Fun­da­men­tally it’s a ubiq­ui­tous habit of want­ing to restore—and more insid­i­ously, to expect change to hap­pen the same way it hap­pened last time—and it relies on the Cliff’s Notes ver­sion of eco­nom­ics and his­tory. As though the only peo­ple in an econ­omy were a few charis­matic megafauna, a corps of earnest and essen­tially non-​​profit bureau­crats, and the undif­fer­en­ti­ated Classes: upper, mid­dle, poor, from which those oth­ers arise now and then by spon­ta­neous gen­er­a­tion. All tidily pro­jected into the future by extrap­o­la­tion: The big charis­matic megafauna of the future must be like the ones of the past, tech­ni­cal not artis­tic, lead­ing not inte­grat­ing, rebuild­ing not repur­pos­ing. The insti­tu­tions of the future will be like our recently lost ones (com­pa­nies, states, all that), the best Mankind has found in the March For­ward. And the Classes, well, they are out of bal­ance.

Now see in your Dark Age, which after all is merely a lacuna between a cou­ple of those ex post facto dis­crete vol­umes of Cliff’s Notes, change hap­pens. The diver­sity of what hap­pens, the details of who’s doing what for whom and under what name, that car­ries on as before. Per­haps moreso. When­ever Empire stum­bles, nov­elty seems more promis­ing out at the unre­marked periph­ery, in the lost provinces and the places where exotic weirdos start try­ing new stuff out. Not in the core.

Some day, hope­fully in a few decades, some­body will real­ize sus­tain­abil­ity is a thing that hap­pens only in places where cen­tral plan­ners look away. I won­der whether we ought to stage a “Dark Age” of our own, rather than wait­ing for all these rebuild­ing rework­ing reboot­ing eco­nomic “devel­op­ment” efforts to fail in turn.

Devel­op­ment is exploita­tion, in Holland’s sense. Let us explore for a while. It’s not merely that the keys aren’t under that light pole, it’s that there are no doors out here in the lovely dark. Let us be bet­ter now to one another, and not worry so much about hon­or­ing the beloved dead: the fac­to­ries, the jobs, the state lines, and the habits of empire.

This is not about “rev­o­lu­tion”, by the way. This is sim­ply a request. Let us please have a King Cnut of Eco­nomic Devel­op­ment: Richard Florida might do fine, if only he was pay­ing atten­tion, because he has con­quered our mind­set for sure. Let him set him­self up on a throne at the shores of our “eco­nomic col­lapse”, and make what­ever ges­tures are called for by his audi­ence to stem the tide of fun­da­men­tal trans­for­ma­tive change, and let him then turn wisely to the fans and lack­eys and point out the moral of this les­son: that Emer­gence is not what you expect and foster.

Sorry. I couldn’t help but laugh out loud there.Richard Florida would never say any­thing of the sort.

Nonethe­less, let us emerge into the dark­ness, in other words. Every­thing that has hap­pened here under the lamp has already come and gone. We should totally leave this lone light here, burn­ing, if noth­ing else to draw the moths and bats it’s always drawn and act out its role as sym­bol of many sorts. Me, I’m headed over there towards those noises….

Against Originality

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Surely I can’t be the first per­son to say it: Our culture’s demand that every great mind be orig­i­nal has become a sti­fling horror.

First, because the sup­posed traits of “orig­i­nal­ity” are a sham, except among the insane. You’re rid­ing the yel­low line next to “schiz­o­phrenic” if you’ve writ­ten an unin­tel­li­gi­ble con­text­less ram­ble in a pri­vate lan­guage. You may already be a sociopath if you con­sis­tently dis­avow the con­ver­sa­tions and train­ing and cul­tural embed­ded­ness of your work’s greater con­text. You’re prob­a­bly delusional—even though we’re all out to under­mine you—if you keep ignor­ing the fre­quent simul­ta­ne­ous appear­ance of sim­i­lar works in diverse set­tings around the world.

And as any decent crazy per­son should, you will get upset when you see “your” idea pop­ping up all over the world as if other peo­ple had stolen it.

Sec­ond, because orig­i­nal­ity is an arti­fi­cial lim­i­ta­tion on a con­tex­tual but intrin­si­cally unlim­ited resource. Cre­ative problem-​​solving. Could you build me a house for this land­scape unlike other people’s? Could you make me think about the mono­lithic raw fact of the world, at least one facet which con­cerns me today, in a way nobody else ever has? Could you design me a drug for my dis­ease, or a valve for my plumb­ing, or a rocket for my war, or a chair which inspires my aes­thete crowd in a way oth­ers in my salient cul­tural net­work will not have expe­ri­enced? Could you please write a book for me, refer­ring to the touch­stones of my cul­tural iden­tity, but which at the same time takes an eye-​​opening new stance?

But don’t use any weird mate­ri­als or tech­niques or too much other funny stuff, of course. Make it just dif­fer­ent enough.

Third, because the illu­sion that con­tin­gent cre­ativ­ity is lim­ited fos­ters rent-​​seeking behav­ior where no rea­son­able claim exists. Of course I will cite you when I explain to my stu­dents about your evoca­tive imagery of rain­drops on cer­tain vari­eties of flower petals, and also your view on the whiskers on kit­tens. I agree to pay that license fee when­ever I drink from a cup with the open­ing cun­ningly placed at the top, rather than the bot­tom. I will hap­pily relin­quish this thing my peo­ple have known since before the mis­sion­ar­ies came, hav­ing heard of your recent patent of the active com­pounds therein. All I have are these cites, whuffie, money, jail time and pub­lic apolo­gies: please take whichever you feel best ame­lio­rates my mis­take.

Not because yours is sub­stan­tially bet­ter than this other one, but because it has been duly recorded in the Big Book of One Law that you used up the entire fuck­ing idea when you staked your claim.

Fourth, because the rent-​​seeking infra­struc­ture sup­ports leeches. Not much more to say on this, right? We will pur­sue your claim. We will root out the inter­lop­ers. We will cre­ate and main­tain a cen­tral cat­a­log that includes your work. We will mon­i­tor the medium itself so that your priv­i­lege is not under­mined. We will strive cease­lessly to extend your priv­i­lege, indeed until well after you are dead.

For a nom­i­nal frac­tion of the fees you are owed.

These can­not be new sto­ries. And I can’t be both­ered to look up who’s been writ­ing about them.

Except every­body since for­ever.

I’m not rant­ing because I’m tired of the easily-​​ridiculed but oner­ous legal restric­tions, the grow­ing tis­sue of lies cen­tered around “cre­ativ­ity” and “exclu­siv­ity” in our legal frame­work, or any of that old crap. Those are easy. Every­body is mad about them.

Hell, we were mad about all that crap before the rest of you started jump­ing on the band­wagon.

No, I’m upset because I got mad the other day when an ass­hole Ger­man engi­neer I know from a con­fer­ence pub­lished a preprint where he posed an “orig­i­nal” the­ory essen­tially iden­ti­cal to stuff we talked about years ago—and he didn’t cite any­body I think he should have, imply­ing that he is map­ping out some New Fron­tier of Thought.

And because Stephen Wol­fram, the man per­son­ally, pisses me off—because his doorstop rel­e­gates the life’s work of smart peo­ple I know to occa­sional men­tions in the tiny appen­dix, imply­ing to most peo­ple that he invented Sci­ence Itself.

I’m upset because when I look at some­thing in some ran­dom book or web­site, or hear some­thing, or some­body men­tions it to me, and it’s a thing I once felt pride in doing or even know­ing, but now every­body does or knows it —I am dri­ven to feel that they’re doing it wrong.

I know because it was some­thing I invested actual think­ing time in back when. And here it is now, much later, being pop­u­lar­ized! And if you look, none of the “orig­i­nal” cre­ative peo­ple who made it a thing to me are men­tioned. It’s all these new main­stream immigrants.

What right have they to it, with­out giv­ing credit where it’s due? Worse, what right have they to use our words to mis­lead their naive fol­low­ers now?

This has hap­pened through the years with “Chaos the­ory”, “com­plex­ity” research, “bio­com­put­ing” research, “agile” soft­ware devel­op­ment and man­age­ment, “cowork­ing”, the “social Web”, “social net­works”, “Prag­ma­tism”… that’s just a quick off-​​the-​​cuff list for me. I did early work with a thing, and nobody much cared, and then much later some­body else did slightly over­lap­ping work, and now it’s all the fuck­ing rage.

And I think Dammit, in my day we were try­ing to save the world, not just sell wid­gets like this ass­hole. Why are they all lis­ten­ing to him? Doesn’t any­body ever read what we said back then when this was really new?

Your mileage may vary, but I will make you eat your hat if you haven’t expe­ri­enced this same emo­tion when faced with inter­lop­ers and other late­com­ers announc­ing their dis­cov­ery of cer­tain styles and gen­res of “sci­ence fic­tion”, “paint­ing”, “pho­tog­ra­phy”, “local food”, “book arts”, “user expe­ri­ence”, “func­tional pro­gram­ming”, “punk”, “con­ser­vatism”, “pro­gres­sivism”, “min­i­mal­ism”, “sus­tain­abil­ity”, “blog­ging”, “anar­chism”, “free verse”, “that crap they call ‘role­play­ing’ these days”, “that crap they call ‘news’ and ‘jour­nal­ism’ these days”, “eco­nomic devel­op­ment”, “genet­ics”, “peren­nial gar­den­ing”, “aero­nau­tics”, “com­pas­sion”, “Chris­t­ian faith”, “Bud­dhism” and so on.

Some folks might think I’m describ­ing envy; that one has a sense of vio­la­tion because these new­fan­gled pop­u­lar­iz­ers are get­ting all the rents one feels are owed to the “real” inven­tors. But it’s not.

I admit it might be a bit like pride. But a strange sort of pride, where you didn’t real­ize you had any until a plug was pulled and it all drained out.

No. I think not.

I think it’s a lot more like the feel­ing you get—as my wife Bar­bara pointed out a cou­ple of days back (see what I did there?)—when you first real­ize your child is her own per­son, and that she’s made her own deci­sion, and that despite all your early work to bring her up right, she’s going to hare off in her own direction.

Because you know what’s over in that direc­tion. You know the has­sle and dan­ger, the illu­sions and pain, the inef­fi­cien­cies and unsat­is­fy­ing expe­ri­ences she’s head­ing for, because you expe­ri­enced them all years ago. You tried to keep her from doing that stu­pid stuff, and tried to get her to see the cool stuff, the life-​​saving and sim­ple stuff, the right stuff, but she’s thought­lessly skep­ti­cal about any­thing she actu­ally heard. And worse, some­day she will come back and announce as “new” some­thing you knew all along.

I think I’m upset because “orig­i­nal­ity cul­ture” makes me feel that all the time now. Not con­tent to be a mere hip­ster claim­ing to have prior knowl­edge of every cul­tural and intel­lec­tual phe­nom­e­non, I am reduced to some hor­rific recur­sive hip­ster, who feels that sad­ness when­ever I am shown some­body is explor­ing a known thing with their own per­spec­tive.

Because of course it’s “orig­i­nal­ity cul­ture” that makes me imag­ine that my expe­ri­ence of that thing, long ago, which I failed to com­mu­ni­cate to these new­com­ers, is in any way salient to what they have going on in their lives. When I did it, it was new, and we expended valu­able resources and took per­sonal risks to do all that, and coined all these new terms to describe the amaz­ingly insight­ful stuff nobody had ever talked about before.

I like to call this the Tozier Effect.

Of course the ass­hole Ger­man can talk about stuff we both have done, for the same rea­son I can: it’s cool and it will help the world to know more about it. And because I am also an ass­hole Ger­man to somebody.

Of course Wol­fram can be the Edi­son of the Sym­bolic World, for the same rea­son Edi­son could: it’s cool and it will help the world to know more about it. And because I have also played Edi­son in my time.

And the nou­veau “agilists” and “com­plex­ol­o­gists” and “Web 3.0 gurus” and the lat­est Busi­ness Rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies and TED-​​talking Inspi­ra­tional Crowd are wel­come to carry on.

There’s enough rea­son for me to ques­tion the very notion of orig­i­nal­ity just in the fact that we so rarely ques­tion the vocab­u­lary we use to dis­cuss it.

I don’t care if you keep using those terms and notions… mostly. Why should I waste time striv­ing to under­mine your claims about how “orig­i­nal­ity” works? Espe­cially by fram­ing my argu­ments in that same ques­tion­able lan­guage of uni­ver­sal­ity, exclu­siv­ity and rights? That’s a sucker’s bet.

I have evi­dence that I’m going to turn out being right when I stop think­ing and talk­ing about “orig­i­nal­ity” in your terms. But I also have evi­dence that you do real good by using those terms. And I have evi­dence that we’re both wrong and should use some other words and ideas instead.

’Tis but the nature of the world.

That said, I’m just decid­ing to stop using those words, even around you. Even when you talk about “your” “cul­ture” “need­ing” to “pro­mote” “inno­va­tion”, even when you talk about “eco­nomic” “growth” and your cul­tural “oblig­a­tion” to be “cited”, or how “artists” will “starve” with­out your “support”.

We’re not going to have those con­ver­sa­tions with those ideas any more, you and me, is all I’m saying.

And I will be a bit hap­pier, and you will be sad and confused.

And that’s an improve­ment, in my book.

Well, OK. Except for one thing.

When it becomes clear that your vocab­u­lary about own­er­ship and rights and pri­or­ity and value is clearly hurt­ing peo­ple? That’s when we will inter­vene. Your wounded ego, your claims that imag­i­na­tion is a zero-​​sum game, your rent-​​seeking, your leech squad—they will become our tar­gets when you cross that line.

Not you. We’re not going to tar­get you. But when you sharpen your final vocab­u­lary into a harm­ful tool, or a cage, or a wall—that’s when we are sup­posed to come along with the breaker bars.

It’s OK. There are other ideas and words in the world. There are always other ones. And you’d be sur­prised how help­ful and good it can be, some­times, to just start with a new batch.

Well, not new as such. You know what I mean.

Can one visualize cosmopolitanism of college students?

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I’m reminded of a GIS visu­al­iza­tion I wanted to see when we were trav­el­ing through lit­tle col­lege towns in Ohio and Indi­ana and Ken­tucky the other day.

We all know col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties draw stu­dents from all over. But some surely tend to draw from a more local pop­u­la­tion, and oth­ers from a more global population.

Ignore for a moment the grad­u­ate and post­doc and young fac­ulty pop­u­la­tions, which are what you might call “seller’s mar­kets” for the time being. For a given insti­tu­tion of higher learn­ing, sup­pose we draw a lin­ear con­nec­tion (on a map) to the home of each stu­dent. Sup­pose we aggre­gate these a bit, per­haps by hier­ar­chi­cal clus­ter­ing; a big bunch of stu­dents at Miami Uni­ver­sity prob­a­bly come from the Cincin­nati area, a bunch from cen­tral Ohio, a smaller but sig­nif­i­cant bunch from the Cleve­land and Toledo areas, a pile from Indi­anapo­lis or whatever.

And here’s where I can’t get past “spaghetti tum­ble” mode. How can one visu­al­ize these flows, with­out dis­card­ing the long tail of unusual cases? I know about the Forbes migra­tion visu­al­iza­tion, but that has a one-​​county-​​at-​​a-​​time thing going on; what could one do with cun­ningly col­ored and/​or shaped poly­gons or something?

What I’m won­der­ing, I sup­pose, is some­thing about the char­ac­ter of col­lege towns. You can see some­thing very close to my sus­pi­cions in the Forbes map: click two adja­cent coun­ties, say Pre­ble County Ohio (rural) and But­ler County Ohio (rural with col­lege town). Notice the difference?

How might one show that sort of thing all at once, and not on a county-​​by-​​county level but on a town-​​by-​​town scale, and not on the basis of pop­u­la­tion migra­tion but on student’s homes?

Because the peo­ple we’re making—the adults we’re making—in these col­lege towns are very, very dif­fer­ent from one another, in my expe­ri­ence. I won­der if self-​​assortment, diver­sity of expe­ri­ence and mutual expo­sure, and echo cham­bers have some­thing impor­tant to say about it.

The only thing coworking needs to be

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I seem to have a lot of trou­ble with ter­mi­no­log­i­cal shifts.

When I was a young com­plex­ol­o­gist, “chaos the­ory” meant some­thing about deter­min­is­tic dynam­i­cal sys­tems. But grad­u­ally the spe­cific field of math­e­mat­i­cal research got pop­u­lar, and stu­pid man­age­ment con­sul­tants (I say this with love) decided they would use the phrase to mean some­thing about touchy-​​feely intu­itive­ness and dinosaurs and more like what they and the Ancient Greeks assumed it meant all along, about dis­rup­tion and meaninglessness.

When I was a young the­o­ret­i­cal biol­o­gist, “com­pu­ta­tional biol­ogy” meant some­thing about agent-​​based mod­els of evo­lu­tion­ary and mol­e­c­u­lar dynam­ics, and explor­ing emer­gence. But cheap com­put­ing resources became avail­able to every­body and their brother, and sud­denly the Peo­ple With Too Many Base Pairs On Hand (I name them with respect) decided they would use the phrase to mean some­thing more about sequence align­ment, and not mul­ti­scale struc­tural biology.

When I was a slightly older com­plex­ol­o­gist, “com­plex sys­tems” went through the same exact bull­shi­ti­za­tion process as “chaos the­ory” did before it. Now, to be frank, it’s just mostly powerlaw-​​bullshit-​​on-​​networks (I say that with no lit­tle bitterness).

Luck­ily, “astro­bi­ol­ogy” doesn’t really have an easy map­ping to busi­ness con­sult­ing, so that one was kind of safe. But—amusingly enough—I didn’t get to do it for very long before the good old Ivy League Cell & Mol­e­c­u­lar Biol­ogy Depart­ment I was work­ing in decided that astro­bi­ol­ogy itself was bull­shit, or at least not Cell & Mol­e­c­u­lar Biol­ogy the way they did it, and they kicked me out. What the heck; turn­about is fair play.

Then there’s “social net­work”, which used to be a bunch of cir­cles and arrows, not a street term for “pri­vacy inva­sion”. There’s “genetic pro­gram­ming”, which became just-​​plain-​​symbolic-​​regression. And “agile soft­ware devel­op­ment”, which used to be about bring­ing value and reduc­ing the risk to devel­op­ers work­ing on soft­ware projects, not speed­ing up prod­uct deliv­ery for their god­damned (and I say that with no love what­so­ever) cor­po­rate man­agers. And “anar­chism”, which only a few peo­ple in the whole damned world still remem­ber means some­thing about being nice to one another because it’s the right thing to do, not throw­ing rocks at cof­fee shops. And “con­ser­vatism”, which you may be sur­prised to learn used to mean some­thing a lot more like “being rea­son­able and tak­ing into account people’s dif­fer­ences”, not being an ass­hole about rich peo­ple get­ting richer. And “Prag­ma­tism”, which isn’t about com­pro­mis­ing your prin­ci­ples for the sake of The Law.

And so on. I’m used to it; I’m sure I’ve missed a bunch. “Skep­ti­cism” for example.

And maybe now “coworking.”

Today we learnt of another cowork­ing busi­ness clos­ing down. And it looks and feels and sounds like the same old process of ter­mi­no­log­i­cal fail­ure to me.

You may not have noticed that I’ve been deeply involved with Workan­tile Exchange in Ann Arbor since before it began. It hasn’t come up much. Mike Kessler is the founder of that busi­ness, but it was a mat­ter of coin­ci­dence that Bar­bara and Laura Fisher and I ran into him after we’d spent more than six months look­ing for an afford­able space for our com­mu­nity of infor­mal col­leagues, and he had spent months build­ing out a won­der­ful com­mer­cial space in down­town Ann Arbor on spec, hop­ing for a com­mu­nity to crop up.

The detailed story’s for another day, but the short ver­sion is salient: From the get-​​go, we under­stood the con­tin­gent real­i­ties of the cowork­ing business.

  • You can’t sell jack shit to unem­ployed peo­ple, so don’t expect to make money by “sup­port­ing those tran­si­tion­ing to an inde­pen­dent lifestyle” (aka, “lay­off vic­tims”). Leave that to the gov­ern­ment, and pure non­profit people.
  • Peo­ple who think they want a desk and a phone and a mail­box really just want to project an illu­sion of corporate-​​style suc­cess, and thus they don’t want to cowork, they want a bargain-​​basement price on an office lease, and a fuck­ing but­ler (I say this with a whole heap of wry bon­homie). So send those peo­ple to a land­lord so they can learn the prices and hid­den costs of actual real estate, and not merely leech off your cowork­ing space’s lease and lim­ited staff and ser­vice budget.
  • Diver­sity of mem­ber­ship reduces the risk to every mem­ber, so don’t try to spe­cial­ize in “mak­ers” or “cre­atives” or “star­tups” and fer­chris­sakes not Realtors.
  • 30% of the work­force is an inde­pen­dent. That com­pares to some­thing like 10% that’s a dopey seat-​​of-​​the-​​pants looking-​​for-​​venture-​​capital startup-​​style big-​​E Entre­pre­neur (I say this with love, and the knowl­edge that “entre­pre­neur­ship” is a cog­ni­tive dis­or­der; I myself am a high-​​functioning entre­pre­neur), and besides they don’t want to spend one thin dime, so don’t even bother deal­ing with col­lege kids or the local incubator’s castoffs.
  • Most land­lords (but appar­ently not ours, thank good­ness), the Use­less Cham­ber of Com­merce, the local Eco­nomic Devel­op­ment grant-​​givers, the State Gov­ern­ment, the can­di­dates who want to demon­strate their “effec­tive­ness”, the News­pa­per Busi­ness Colum­nist, any­body who thinks of them­selves as an “angel investor”, and for that mat­ter any per­son who has ever watched an unironic hour of Bloomberg Tele­vi­sion? Those peo­ple do not get it. In their world, the only way to make money is to raise prices and offer improved ser­vices until demand tapers off. Cowork­ing is not about quid pro quo, it’s not a zero-​​sum game, it’s not about being a land­lord or find­ing arbi­trary ten­ants or even—this is impor­tant—mak­ing money. You can­not make a profit by run­ning a cowork­ing space.

That last one’s impor­tant. We’re not com­mu­nists, we’re not anti-​​capitalists and we’re not run­ning some kind of pep club. It’s just that we’ve thought about it. You can­not make a profit sell­ing community.

So the ques­tion is: what the hell is “cowork­ing” then? I mean, I’ve dis­qual­i­fied rent­ing desks to peo­ple, and set­ting up offices for inde­pen­dents, and all that other nor­mal stuff. What is it?

It’s com­mu­nity. Not the kind you join because it “offers good oppor­tu­ni­ties for net­work­ing and pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment”, but the kind you join because it would be neat.

It’s church. Not the kind where you wor­ship, but the kind you go to for fel­low­ship with peo­ple from diverse back­grounds, but who are in the same essen­tial and exis­ten­tial posi­tion you are: Inde­pen­dent in a world that assumes you have a “job title” and a “boss” and “employer health­care” or you can “send a pur­chase order”.

It’s a club. Not the kind you go for help, but—and I’m sorry if this makes me sound like a super­cil­ious ass­hole—the kind of club you join in order to build a strong bar­rier between you and the Pinks, the Nor­mals, the hoi pol­loi. Though in our case, those hoi pol­loi are often the bosses, the politi­cos, the nom­i­nal movers and shak­ers of the “work­ing world”.

We’re not them. We’re the 30% of the peo­ple who are inde­pen­dent of all that.

That 30% is all over the place. But who­ever it is we actu­ally are, we’re also proud. Of who we are, and of what we’re help­ing to create.

I’m not as full of hot air as nor­mal, here. Dur­ing the first two years of Workan­tile Exchange’s exis­tence, Mike Kessler tried sell­ing desks, and sell­ing mail­boxes, and sub­leases, and startup incu­ba­tion, and non­profit meet­ings, and maker spaces, and all the rest of that stuff. You know what broke every one of those busi­ness mod­els? Those peo­ple don’t want to belong to a com­mu­nity. They want ser­vices, and they want dis­counts.

All this boils down to: sus­tain­able cowork­ing isn’t any­thing to do with office space at all. Any moron can buy a cubi­cle and set it up in her garage or her spare bed­room, and sit there and play My Spe­cial Office when­ever she wants.

It’s not about “work” at all. Real cowork­ing is about the “co-​​” part, about being together. Pride. Like-​​mindedness. About avoid­ing the risks and vicis­si­tudes of sit­ting at work by your­self, not being exposed to the exter­nal­i­ties of real life by your­self, about not rein­vent­ing the wheel by your­self every time a com­puter acts weird or a con­tract gets con­fus­ing or a law­suit pops up or your dog needs a play date or you have too much work.

And (because this comes up) it’s not about being some kind of consensus-​​driven co-​​op, either. We remain inde­pen­dent, or we lose our self-​​definition com­pletely and fall back to being mere ama­teurs with “lifestyle businesses”.

Nope. Cowork­ing is a way of eat­ing entropy. Redi­rect­ing risk using com­mu­nity dynam­ics. If you want to think about it in a con­fronta­tional way, it’s about co-​​opting the same social design patterns—colocation, team for­ma­tion, com­ple­men­tary skillsets, tacit knowl­edge bank­ing, and col­lab­o­ra­tive risk balancing—that cor­po­ra­tions bring to bear against us.

It sad­dens me that I never got a chance to visit Car­rboro Cre­ative Cowork­ing, and it sad­dens me more to see them join the ranks of those who have fallen. But it doesn’t sur­prise me.

We’re weird. We’re prob­a­bly weird enough that we’re wrong in a lot of ways. It’s deathly tir­ing to con­stantly have to explain all this to guests and vis­i­tors and peo­ple look­ing for things we’ve decided not to offer, and just have it bounce off their fore­heads’ Cog­ni­tive Dis­so­nance fields. And as Workan­tile Exchange tran­si­tions from a fail­ing for-​​profit to a sta­ble what-​​the-​​hell-​​who-​​cares-​​about-​​money low-​​profit, maybe we’ll fall by the way­side ourselves.

I don’t think so, though.

We have more than 60 mem­bers right now who are diverse, pow­er­ful, enthu­si­as­tic experts in their fields. We have archi­tects, film­mak­ers, authors, edi­tors, busi­ness devel­op­ment peo­ple, lawyers, activists, traders, pro­gram­mers, graphic design­ers, stu­dents, con­sul­tants, remote employ­ees, mar­keters, and even a dilet­tante or two (like me). We have tequila tast­ings and book fairs, art gallery open­ings and Word­Press Users meet­ings. We have the amaz­ing vol­un­teer con­tri­bu­tions of Trek Glowacki, the hon­ored and respected Mem­ber who’s been work­ing for more than two years as our de facto “com­mu­nity man­ager”, and of Tom Brandt and David Erik Nel­son who (with me) are try­ing to “man­age” us into a new, more rea­son­able busi­ness model. And all the many vol­un­teers among the Con­tribut­ing mem­ber­ship, who have given time to mop and tidy and run events and intro­duce peo­ple to one another, share lunch and talk and offer advice, fill the air with music and chatter.

And tol­er­ate one another. And see value in one another.

Any­body can be wrong. But see: the more dif­fer­ent you all are from one another, the less likely that becomes.

Maybe to suc­ceed in the long term we really do need to spe­cial­ize, and exclu­sively rent desks to dudes who wear iden­ti­cal khakis as they work on the Next Google, or mar­ket more to women entre­pre­neurs whose busi­nesses have been sin­gled out by local eco­nomic devel­op­ment experts as lead­ing the way into the 20th Cen­tury, or give dis­counts to poor out-​​of-​​work cor­po­rate lay­off vic­tims who need a hand dur­ing their tran­si­tion to this unfa­mil­iar world that has no “work life bal­ance”, which only includes life, with work as a part of that.

Maybe we’re wrong.

Who cares? If this is wrong, it’ll do for now.

Every day it lasts is wonderful.