The other day I wrote a bit about remem­ber­ing, and things oth­er­wise unre­marked tied together to make the cloth of his­tory. This was framed a bit as a reac­tion to purg­ers, cleansers, sim­pli­fiers and the norm, but really? Really it was a circle’s line cross­ing sev­eral times (they can do that, you know).

I use that phrase “draw­ing a cir­cle” often. It’s Charles Fort’s, orig­i­nally. Go look it up if you need remind­ing. He was a crazy old crack­pot of a fel­low, Char­lie was. Amus­ing, though: he could after all tell an engag­ing story.

Any­way, a decade is a fool­ishly long time to draw a cir­cle; fif­teen years, twenty years, a life­time even cra­zier. You get wild some­times along the path, or jit­tery, or buf­feted off course, or just plain bored. Even­tu­ally you don’t end up with any­thing quite so pre­cise or Zen as a “cir­cle”. But you draw, and what you draw you call a cir­cle because that’s what the metaphor demands: it’s always a circle.

I think 1997 it was I had a chance to visit Trin­ity. The place with the bomb, and the place about which I wrote my first blog-​​ramble thing about my father’s sto­ries of work­ing on high-​​speed cam­eras capa­ble of tak­ing pho­tographs of nuclear explo­sions, and how (because surely the records are gone, or at least unre­marked) those pho­tos of the grow­ing blos­som of Trinity’s explo­sion must there­fore be his, mine, ours, that camera’s. I called it “nanohis­tory” back then; it was a bit of a gag on nan­otech­nol­ogy I thought, and the future, and also mul­ti­scaled phe­nom­ena which we were all doing back in the day, but that was the thing I saw and wrote.

By now some of the folks who ate Green Chili Cheese­burg­ers with me at the Owl (best in the world) and rode the Trin­ity bus that day have had strokes. Some Ph.D.s are granted; some wives are dead. They’ve moved out of their well-​​preserved Mod­erne homes along the Turquoise Trail, they’re still liv­ing in Santa Fe, they’re where they went. And so on. Years of lit­tle accu­mu­lated drifts have piled up around the line they drew col­lec­tively. Unre­marked (at least by me) since the day I filled a roll of 35mm film with their por­traits lit by White Sands sun.

And in that time I’ve emp­tied out the house where my father’s and mother’s mate­r­ial sto­ries, their “mem­o­ra­bilia”, was stock­piled, and picked up new habits and careers, had deaths and all kinds of wig­gles of my own. Even the ram­bling essay I wrote in Santa Fe is nearly gone from the world. Its ear­lier ver­sions are surely gone, as I never have been both­ered to keep older ver­sions, early edits, that sort of thing, and I just threw away the diskettes a week or two back. In the trash. There is no machine in my house that could read them, after all, so why bother with drafts of unread rambles?

This is nor­mal stuff. Mun­dane; entirely of the world. But it’s about remem­ber­ing. Being reminded.

We were invent­ing Big Data back there in the late 1990s. Have I told you that? I think I’ve apol­o­gized for it already. But some of the very peo­ple at Trin­ity with me that first Sat­ur­day in Octo­ber fif­teen years back were the founders of bioin­for­mat­ics. Some of us are the data min­ers who wres­tle piles and reams of ASCII and pix­els into cobbled-​​together con­trap­tions we built from folk wis­dom and jury-​​rigged repur­posed com­po­nents we dragged out from the garage. We were dis­cov­er­ing how to ren­der data down into clar­i­fied, burn­ing util­ity: mod­els, pre­dic­tions, and above all con­trols.

Con­trol was a big one, and I think the most ironic. After all, we were com­plex­ol­o­gists: for fuck’s sake we were the End of Sci­ence, with our hand-​​waving anec­do­tal sub­jec­tive con­tin­gent agent-​​based mod­els. We were about emer­gence, the not just uncon­trolled but inexplicable.

Though it didn’t really work out that way some­how. Nowa­days not many of us are left here in the Prover­bial Woods. There’s a fad or a rev­o­lu­tion or a war or some­thing, or so I hear, and the vast major­ity have put on ill-​​fitting suits and gone down to the City to be hired up by Big Data Distilleries—Big Brother, Data Sci­ence, and even a few at the Tower of Words. Those folks stroll the aisles now under sus­pended ceil­ings of fluorescent-​​lit data cen­ters, pat­ting earnest work­ers in (prover­bial) white lab coats on their shoul­ders. Either that, or they fell to the ser­vice of cor­po­ra­tions, and their work became the jar­gon of the Street, which dearly loved our Edges of Chaos and Emer­gences and Non­lin­ear­i­ties as handy excuses for doing what had already been decided: mak­ing this world we live in.

Just a few of us left here End­ing Sci­ence these days. A lit­tle bit at a time, the work goes on until we’re all bought off or dead. We’re not a colony in any sense now of course; more in the role of folksy fogeys in the shad­ows of the diner down­town, talk­ing up con­tin­gency and nar­ra­tive, while cling­ing to an obso­lete human­is­tic def­i­n­i­tion of “emer­gence” and “path-​​dependence” nearly all worn to thread like a quilt in a barn.

Yeah, well. At least there’s coffee.

Hey, here’s a funny thing: Did you know it’s no longer obses­sive com­pul­sive dis­or­der when you col­lect a petabyte of data from a par­tic­u­lar rat neu­ron and absorb your months’ atten­tion focused on just the lovely pat­terns in the spike trains? Or that it’s no longer hoard­ing when you’re dri­ven to stock­pile every dig­i­tized book in the entire world? Or that even the old saw about try­ing the “same thing over and over and expect­ing dif­fer­ent out­comes” doesn’t really come into play nowa­days when the things you keep try­ing are the func­tional capac­i­ties of com­bi­na­to­r­ial vari­ants of pro­tein sequences? And! And! It isn’t eavesdropping—you are not a scary neigh­bor lady—when all the phone calls of a city are pressed into your ser­vice of know­ing what those damned kids are doing over there, with their par­ents away (it shouldn’t be allowed)!

That’s infer­ence now, not madness.

It’s the fron­tier we (and oth­ers not far out along our social net­works) opened up for you all, about the time we rode the dusty road into Trin­ity. All those things are now new kinds of ser­vice. Not a sad lone mad­ness left among them.

[“Isn’t that inter­est­ing, isn’t that inter­est­ing.” That’s what my sharp old friend Lew Tilney would have said, with­out a sin­gle ques­tion mark at all, when I was dazedly walk­ing the halls of Leidy Labs try­ing des­per­ately to dis­cover what was wanted of me by my supe­ri­ors. He’d walk up and slap his hand down on your shoul­der and say, “Tozier! You know about trees! I was just read­ing about trees! Did you know there’s absolutely no damned way water can get to the top of trees? Physics won’t han­dle it! Now isn’t that inter­est­ing.” And he’d stride down the hall in his red socks and I’d wish I could see what came of that thread, instead of hav­ing to jus­tify the count­ing of com­bi­na­to­r­ial pro­teins’ func­tions to peo­ple who found it mad. I learned years too late that Lew was always right every time he told you, “Now isn’t that inter­est­ing.” It was and is always inter­est­ing, salient, con­nected. There is never any ques­tion to mark.]

So a point is, that I wouldn’t be sur­prised if there was a time around 1900 when talk­ing into boxes and expect­ing an answer stopped being con­sid­ered mad­ness. Or a time when act­ing as though you knew what a per­son far away was doing that very day didn’t make folks laugh. And so on. You get that pic­ture? Now isn’t that interesting.

At any rate, some of the peo­ple on that bus to Trin­ity, and plenty more who didn’t make the trip that day, or who I met later or ear­lier in my life by a few years one way or the other—they made all these mad­nesses into stuff you see on mag­a­zine cov­ers and RSS feeds.

And I love that. I can’t tell you how lucky I’ve been to fall into this hobby of watch­ing smart peo­ple notic­ing things.

It feels like “mad­ness” peri­od­i­cally becomes the fab­ric of soci­eties, in turns, as new trans­for­ma­tive tech­nolo­gies come online and escape and spread and do their stuff. I could be more focused I’m sure, more jour­nal­is­tic. I could refer to one of those Philoso­phers of Sci­ence you only really see in epi­grams these days, Kuhn or Lakatos or some­body. But not this time; this is mere folksy ram­bling, not obser­va­tion of a sort that’s useful.

I just noticed, is all. Way I see it, this is me just hav­ing fun watch­ing smart peo­ple start­ing to try to real­ize they ought maybe to notice some­thing again. And undoubt­edly I’ll just sit here and watch for a while more, and when nothing’s forth­com­ing, maybe I’ll just change the subject.

Not worked it out? Well, that’s fine, that’s fine. No rea­son to stop chat­ting, is it?

Maybe we ought to shift gears, talk about the human­i­ties for a while. Wikipedia (I smile for some rea­son when­ever I link there these days) says the human­i­ties are dis­ci­plines that study the human con­di­tion. “Dis­ci­plines” is another word that makes me smile nowa­days, too, thank Abbott.

You know, I have a fond respect for those poor folks in the human­i­ties. Per­sonal fond­ness even. When I was a kid, it was decided I was either going to go to Case and be a biol­o­gist, or go to Ober­lin or what’s that other place’s name that begins with a D—I can’t recall—and be an Eng­lish major. A writer sort. Senior year it was old Bill Caw­ley, my high school Eng­lish teacher (so hard not to say “pro­fes­sor”, isn’t it?) who slapped a hand down on my shoul­der and told me peo­ple actu­ally still could make a liv­ing, if a hard one, writ­ing. But I picked the other, and luck­ily too because I met my beloved wife of twenty-​​five years (amus­ingly enough in a His­tory of Sci­ence course, about sto­ries, words, though we barely paid atten­tion at the time for love), and as a pretty good sci­ence sort I got even­tu­ally to that bus in Trin­ity, and learned or to some extent made up the skills of Big Data. And here I am. A folk­ways prac­ti­tioner of complexology.

Along the way I spent time in var­i­ous acad­e­mies and such. Over there sat the archae­ol­o­gists, writ­ers, the his­to­ri­ans and all those other human­i­ties folks (who I swear actu­ally wear tweed some­times), cling­ing to shrink­ing islands of depart­ments in the context-​​focused Trans­formed Uni­ver­si­ties of the Aus­tere Era. Try­ing dili­gently to instill a love of let­ters, or story, or mem­ory or some­thing in the thou­sands of kids who trooped through the lec­ture halls.

Kids are still, at least for the moment, expected to get an embed­ding cul­tural frame­work slapped around them, if only to keep them good cit­i­zens and informed vot­ers and able to see per­spec­tive on the human con­di­tion. Though not too much.

What­ever is the “human con­di­tion” these days? Surely it’s 2.0 by now. It’s a kind of mad­ness to think it hasn’t changed, that peo­ple haven’t been trans­formed utterly by all this net­work­ing and hav­ing machine intel­li­gences at hand with which they can sift the raw data of the rev­o­lu­tion to pro­duce infor­ma­tion, util­ity, weal and woe of var­i­ous sorts. I mean: we have a new ubiq­ui­tous sen­so­rium! A dif­fer­ent world, in which Sci­ence didn’t End at all.

And see all of pub­lic pol­icy seems now to want to do away with the waste Great Works entail, the dis­trac­tion from what kids want and what’s best for them. Ide­ally they should be get­ting jobs, and learn­ing skills, and prepar­ing for what­ever it is Big Data uncov­ers “auto­mat­i­cally”. That’s what I seem to hear. Polit­i­cally con­ser­v­a­tive folks want to do away with the thoughts that the human­i­ties pro­voke; polit­i­cally lib­eral folks want to do away with the ties to benighted and inhu­man Bad Old Hege­monic Times the human­i­ties rehu­man­ize. In both cases I think it’s maybe the sense of incon­sis­tency you get from read lit­er­a­ture and dis­cussed his­tory that’s the biggest threat. We talk of the human­i­ties in terms of waste and inutil­ity, but really they’re seen as a threat.

They’re con­fus­ing. They dilute the story of the present and the future.

Let­ters, you see, are com­plex. His­tory isn’t glib, it’s really never glib: it’s got folds tucked into its folds, and every­thing seems to mean some­thing else to some­body else. The human­i­ties are oner­ous because they’re all so tied together by these con­fus­ing per­sonal sub­jec­tive acci­den­tal ram­i­fied net­works that reach back down into the stacks of libraries we’re emp­ty­ing, and mean­ings and usage we’re gloss­ing over these days.

And so they’re dan­ger­ous. Lean times call for lean­ness; what’s needed now is an effi­cient abil­ity to frame every action­able item and sort it on the basis of deliv­ered value. His­tory doesn’t have a lane on the kanban.

It’s a waste­ful kind of mad­ness to dive down too far into old books. And a dan­ger­ous kind of mad­ness to force kids who might bet­ter be work­ing in the present and build­ing our future to sit quiet and look instead into the past. What could they pos­si­bly gather up from that well-​​trod ceme­tery soil? Things are dif­fer­ent now.

By now you’re think­ing I’m bemoan­ing the end of the human­i­ties depart­ments and the clo­sure of libraries and the loss of all that tweed. Really? You know, that would be a nice sim­ple story you could dis­till out of this path if you like: “Dagnab­bit, wouldn’t it be bet­ter if we taught kids Greek again? Why not add Let­ters and His­tory to STEM, and make it… STEMLH. Crap. We’re going to need more vow­els. Get Art on the phone, stat.”

But no, that’s not what I’m encir­cling. That’s been done, and besides I’m sup­posed to be End­ing Science.

The trick is, Sci­ence is all tied and twisted up in the Human­i­ties, Snow notwith­stand­ing. They’re jeal­ous sib­lings, copy­ing one another in turn. Now isn’t that interesting.

Here’s what I love about the human­i­ties, at this junc­ture: Just as every fam­ily gath­er­ing has that mem­o­rable crazy Aunt or Uncle, the human­i­ties still insist on com­ing to our metaphoric Thanks­giv­ings and ram­bling on about their per­sonal hobby horses.

Bru­tal frank­ness: I like them human­i­ties folks much bet­ter these days than I like most of my Sci­encey Engi­neery cohort, or most any of the folks who sit with me at con­fer­ences of learned soci­eties nowa­days when I deign to drag myself down to the City and attend. They’re all good peo­ple who com­pute and sift and train up the Future, but they are nonethe­less a bor­ing old bunch. That stereo­type is still just as true as the tweed human­ists’ trope.

Ah but see, those human­i­ties folks, they can tell a story. And they remem­ber stuff. Crazy stuff, like how to read the ship­ping man­i­fests of third cen­tury Asia Minor, or how some ellip­tic ref­er­ences to “death” are really horny poet-​​talk while oth­ers are about tuber­cu­lo­sis. And this one is best, as I see it: They’re will­ing to use the word “remem­ber” to refer to acts of con­struc­tion.

They apol­o­gize a lit­tle bit to the rest of us when they “remem­ber”, just to explain the weird affec­ta­tion they have that telling a story is build­ing a thing. The mode in sci­ence these days, and also engi­neer­ing, is that remem­ber­ing is par­ing away mis­takes, and dis­clos­ing the real truth of the world so it can be shared and con­sis­tency may reign on Earth as it does… (well you know the rest of that one). Among them­selves the human­i­ties folks all know remem­ber­ing is a spe­cial kind of mak­ing, that recall­ing and record­ing is con­struct­ing nov­elty, that it’s not com­pu­ta­tion or reduc­tion or scour­ing away matrix. And even bet­ter: they know how to make this spe­cial mad kind of mak­ing use­ful, or at least engag­ing and enter­tain­ing. Often as not they spend most of their time enter­tain­ing one another, read­ing their papers aloud at con­fer­ences and such, but some­times one will be lifted up from their shrink­ing island pre­serve and be pre­sented in the pop­u­lar press, as a kind of Out­sider Artist or something.

That thing they do, I like that. I like their mind­ful­ness, that they act as if know­ing were making.

Not many of us like it so much any more, though. It’s a mad notion when you look at it from a mod­ern per­spec­tive: his­tory and lit­er­a­ture, poetry and clas­sics, archae­ol­ogy and danc­ing about archi­tec­ture. “Mad” for the same rea­sons you’d be put away in a rest home for stand­ing up in a busy pub­lic place where peo­ple are try­ing to go off and get their proper work done, yelling and rant­ing and invok­ing archaic names in cease­less demands that they slow down and notice, see what’s there—or more likely what isn’t there.

Crazy peo­ple tell folks to slow down in lean times. They ques­tion what’s real and known and true all over again, stuff we’ve shipped, the truth we’ve accu­mu­lated. As if when you exam­ined it again for the hun­dredth time, the old pho­to­graph of a bomb explod­ing would this time be more than an image of real­ity hang­ing on a fence in a desert. Some kind of story you made up on the spot, dif­fer­ent next time.

But of course you and I know remem­ber­ing is sim­ply look­ing stuff up.

It’s not mak­ing things up. Data access, which is why we’re all so earnest in our record­ing and cura­tion of the facts. Data access is what dri­ves Big Sci­ence now, and mar­ket­ing and all sta­tis­ti­cal mir­a­cles that have come to pass and are nascent in the world. It’s the real world, the world of data that’s impor­tant, not the made-​​up world of fic­tion and his­tory. A can­cer cure is not a story, nor is the money in the bank you made from high-​​speed trad­ing, nor even the counts of the num­ber of times the gen­dered pro­nouns appeared in our dig­i­tized Early Mod­ern books. Those are facts, writ­ten down right there on in public.

And yet there are still a few of these other poor folks, sit­ting down and qui­etly read­ing old stuff and act­ing as if mod­ern sta­tis­tics and data-​​driven expla­na­tions were any­thing at all like story-​​telling. Mad folk. Fid­dling in back-​​country hollers of the acad­emy, lit­tle ivy-​​covered muse­ums and even lone shacks off the beaten track, refus­ing for what­ever rea­son to move down to the City and get them­selves a proper job adjunct­ing or something.

Ayup.

No, that was it. I was just think­ing out loud about the human­i­ties, is all. Sad to see them go, you know. But it’s for the best.

Say, I bet you know about data! I’ve been think­ing a lit­tle about data lately. Did you know that there’s so much data now that there’s no damned way to con­sider every model, pre­dic­tion, or con­trol mechanism—even for one given data stream? Let alone all of them! It makes no sense. Data’s all there, mod­els are sim­ple to build, and so now all the work is boiled down to argu­ments over tech­nique, con­coct­ing var­i­ous approaches and invok­ing con­flict­ing proofs, and wor­ry­ing about util­ity func­tions and con­straints and con­tin­gen­cies. Hell, it’s like now we have the data, only the hard part is left: fig­ur­ing out what ques­tions to ask first.

Now isn’t that interesting.