I recently spent a week in a tower look­ing down on Philadel­phia, rid­ing up and down to talks and bacon-​​filled break­fasts and warn­ing the other res­i­dents away from the fabled Ele­va­tor that Gets Stuck, divid­ing my day among the nine par­al­lel “tracks”—as if they were dis­con­nected and unre­lated in any way from one another—of a tech­ni­cal con­fer­ence in a field I “work in”.

I spent the week watch­ing peo­ple nego­ti­ate the var­i­ous fields they say they “work in”. Watched them talk­ing and argu­ing, enlight­en­ing and redefin­ing one another through their descrip­tions of their own work, their geog­ra­phy and fam­ily trees (the Ger­mans made a big show­ing; the Vir­gini­ans not so much), their social strata (stu­dents, post-​​docs, pro­fes­sors, cor­po­rates, and then the strange inex­plic­a­ble escapees like myself). Some of us acknowl­edged and hon­ored the 20^th anniver­sary of the most influ­en­tial work in the sub­ject, John Koza’s Genetic Pro­gram­ming: On the Pro­gram­ming of Com­put­ers by Means of Nat­ural Selec­tion, and I watched as we lined our­selves up (this “field” we are) along the expected lines and ranks all over again.

I sat for an hour or so after the poster ses­sion until the her­nia pain I was hav­ing sub­sided, and a lit­tle crowd of enthu­si­as­tic Com­puter Sci­en­tists got caught in the eddy I made and sat down to chat about Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence and sci­ence fic­tion and what makes Genetic Pro­gram­ming the last best hope for the future of Strong AI, and so on. Now and then I’d open my mouth and say some­thing about how the notion of AI has become a frag­ile social shred of Cold War hubris, how even the idea of design­ing soft­ware is sub­ject to inter­pre­ta­tions these friends and col­leagues have never really under­stood, about the ways that sta­tis­ti­cians and soft­ware devel­op­ers and soci­ol­o­gists do their work with­out step­ping into these onto­log­i­cal traps… but those went over like a lead balloon.

I was watch­ing a “field” folded up into itself, address­ing itself. A closed field. And that’s OK. Fields are ubiq­ui­tous and ephemeral. They’re what we make of them, and the use we derive from being able to tell sim­pler sto­ries is more than enough to com­pen­sate for the obsta­cles they can occa­sion­ally create.

It was thrilling to watch my conference’s “field” being born, twenty years back. There is no less thrill in see­ing the lit­tle cracks and folds, the seams split­ting and the periph­ery falling away, as it falls apart.

Soon all sorts of raw mate­ri­als will be exposed and made avail­able again. All sorts of pos­si­bil­i­ties are stored already there in Res Poten­tia (as an old friend would say)—in the echoes of what was said along the way but ignored and for­got­ten in the rush for­ward, and the glimpses folks have had (but kept to them­selves) of other fields’ sto­ry­lines. Com­po­nents, parts and pas­sages, the stuff nobody has ever done a close read­ing of, the unrecorded his­to­ries and the things nobody even both­ers to say “I thought of that first!” about.

Turnover. Progress. A net­work unstitched and rewritten.

Some­thing like fif­teen years before the tower con­fer­ence, I’d been asked to leave my posi­tion as a grad­u­ate can­di­date in Biol­ogy at the Uni­ver­sity down the road from where I was now loom­ing. I went to the con­fer­ence think­ing I might find time to be melan­choly or bit­ter with that shadow down ’tother end of Wal­nut Street, like the other sur­vivors of Grad School Culls I’ve met. Grad­u­ate School and the aca­d­e­mic life are so important-​​feeling when you’re that age.

But there were no pangs or twinges. Grad­u­ate School—and the Acad­emy more broadly—are no less sto­ries than my “field” is a story. We use them as excuses for the embar­rass­ing mad thoughts and triv­ial affec­ta­tions we enter­tain while we fill our days with life. More broadly, they’re mem­o­ries of the Cold War and its resource lim­i­ta­tions, and lit­tle mir­rors of the states in which we house them: impe­r­ial, famil­ial, col­le­gial, or ruth­less. We speak of them as though they’re tools, and in a sense they are. But their util­ity comes not from what they do directly, but the boost they give the scan­sion of our lives after the fact.

It all reads bet­ter when you’ve done what’s expected, don’t you think? Con­tra com­mon usage, you don’t do Grad­u­ate School. It’s a thing that explains what you’ve been doing, why you look that way or act that way, why your enthu­si­asms and naiveté are so refresh­ing or enrag­ing. Grad­u­ate School is itself a “field”.

I real­ize I never did tell any­body at the con­fer­ence what it is I really do. What my “field” “really” is.

They tend to just assume, when you’re at a tech­ni­cal con­fer­ence. A few old friends and col­leagues know a bit bet­ter, but they still can’t quite con­nect the dots. Beyond some jokes about me being a spy of some sort because I was so cagey about my plans and scope and affil­i­a­tions, I don’t think many folk really noticed. We talked about the things I’ve done of course, but that’s how this sort of thing works, and it’s the com­mon ground for any conversation.

I con­fess that I look for­ward to the day we all meet at some other future con­fer­ence and com­pare notes, and end up frown­ing and smil­ing about the dif­fer­ent sto­ries we’ve told about the same stuff. I’ll be there, smil­ing and frown­ing and shrug­ging right along with them. Pick a plane or a cave wall to project the shadow of the Real World onto, and tell a story about the out­lines it makes. The trick is to shrug and smile and pick another plane and do it all again to get a com­pletely dif­fer­ent shadow, until you find the one most use­ful for the day. It’s a magic trick for most folks. Now and then I try to share the secrets, but when I start to explain the habits and prac­tices and assump­tions that make this stuff fea­si­ble and inter­est­ing… those go over like a lead balloon.

That story—itself about stories—isn’t sim­ple yet.

At the Wal­nut Street Uni­ver­sity fif­teen years ago, I was asked to quit mak­ing a scene by beg­ging my the­sis com­mit­tee to treat my com­pu­ta­tional whatever-​​it-​​was (“research”?) as Biol­ogy proper. The story I can tell now is that I was freed to do the work in the proper “field”, the one that brought me back to this con­fer­ence in the tower fif­teen years later. But in the con­text of the day it was a blow. Look at the young enthu­si­asts in schools around the world, learn­ing and eager and lis­ten­ing to the sto­ries we build tow­ers out of. Ivory tow­ers, con­fer­ence towers—all kinds.

It’s good to fit. To have a sim­ple story every­body knows, and use our sto­ries of sim­i­lar work and sim­i­lar life to shore up the walls of the place we all work together. Our “field”, our “Uni­ver­sity”, our “discipline”.

The story I tried to tell when I was in Grad­u­ate School down ’tother end of Wal­nut Street, before I knew how to do this sort of thing, was about Bio­log­i­cal Engi­neer­ing, and Maker Cul­ture, and explain­ing things by chang­ing the world. It was all the start of some­thing hap­pen­ing in some other tower, I real­ize. The story I end up telling now is how doing that same work has nearly bro­ken my old friend and advi­sor (or at least made him sound like a crack­pot to our peers), how the world has caught up and it pleases me to see peo­ple in places besides the other end of Wal­nut Street doing the very work we wanted, and how much plea­sure I take in know­ing peo­ple who knit DNA and cre­ate jel­ly­fish from rat cells and threaten to cure not dis­ease but a worldview.

Dif­fer­ent plane and a dif­fer­ent pro­jec­tion of the same real stuff. The world doesn’t give a damn what we say about it, so we’re free to make new sto­ries on demand. There are always new tow­ers being built, and raw mate­ri­als get­ting freed up as older ones are disassembled.

I wave down Wal­nut Street, and never really think about it again except with a smile. I won­der where those peo­ple live now, and what it’s like in the world for them. Is it the same? Is it trans­formed yet?

Always be will­ing to wait for one of the Ele­va­tors that Doesn’t Get Stuck.

What I do is edit. I’m an Edi­tor. It will be a lit­tle while before folks real­ize what that means, is all. And I’ll be shrug­ging right there along­side them as we find the words to use when we explain it, and tell that story more use­fully, more sim­ply. And maybe a cure will start to come along with these new sto­ries, as more peo­ple real­ize they have trou­ble telling unfaceted tales, lin­ear tales, sta­ble tales of one thing lead­ing to another.

Being an Edi­tor has a lot to do with sal­vage, with sur­fac­ing and sug­gest­ing uses for the raw mate­ri­als freed up when our sto­ries change them­selves. You site your­self at the edges of sev­eral shad­ows, and you squint up at the sun to see what’s really up there, and over time you learn to make some shad­ows of your own. Every story changes itself in the telling. That’s not merely our work as Edi­tors, but our lives.

Nobody would believe me if I came right out and said that I cre­ate the field to suit the work I want to do. On the fly; not from whole cloth, but from the chunks of other fields as needed. Nor will they believe you, when you are cured of your pro­fes­sion and start to merely do what’s called for to make your­self useful.

At least that’s the story I tell myself. It does the job.

Later: Lau­rent Bossavit has reminded me of Venkatash Rao’s sim­i­lar essay from a few months back, far less ellip­ti­cal than mine. Go and enjoy. It’s good to fit.