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Matching Grants

Here's an idea, borrowed from the world of non-profits and venture capital, for the eventual reconstruction of Iraq, and for all future conflicts built on the same model: matching grants. What if we decided that anytime someone decides to embark on one of these "humanitarian" pre-emptive attacks -- allegedly done in the interest of the people being invaded -- the invading country has to provide matching grants for the recovery of the country. Basically whatever they spend tearing it down, they need to spend building it back up again. So if they spend $80 billion on swords, they have to cough up $80 billion on ploughshares at the other end. War is already filled with dozens of generally agreed-upon conventions: don't interrogate POWs on TV, don't pretend to surrender and then shoot when you get close. How about we add a new one for countries that decide to bomb for peace?

Don't get me wrong: I genuinely believe there are situations in which bombing for peace is not oxymoronic, or even moronic. They're just pretty extraordinary situations, and that extraordinariness should be reflected in the rebuilding. (A little thing called the Marshall Plan comes to mind.) If the US really believes that it's helping Iraq by dropping thousands of smart bombs on it, it should put its reconstructive money where its destructive mouth is. Unlike the shameful record with Afghanistan in this year's budget.

Naïve? Soft on terrorism? Been done/proposed before? Exactly the kind of thing the French would say? I invite your comments...

Hit and Run

A few items I've meaning to point to over the past few days. John Bury has co-created an interesting Explorer for Windows plugin called "Eyebees" that lets you see live "swarming" behavior online, in the form of separate people all visiting a website at the same time. (He's talking about it as a new possibility for political demonstrations online -- the equivalent of marching down Fifth Avenue.) I've also been enjoying Zack Lynch's brainwaves blog, which is devoted entirely to brain technology and science news. It seems to be still in introductory mode, but it's a great premise for a blog. Speaking of brains, my Discover cover story on Fear (the first in the three-part neuroscience of emotion series) is finally online at Discover. The next installment, on Laughter, should go live in a week or so. I'll point to it when it does -- I'm especially fond of this one. In the meantime, you can always read it by picking up a copy of the print magazine.

Where I'm at

I'm out town for the next few days, staying with friends about two hours north of the city, though I popped in for twelve hours just now to give a speech. Weirdly, the place we're staying has zero mass media: the satellite dish is down, there's no local reception, and there doesn't seem to be a radio anywhere. To follow the war, I've been logging on over a 28.8 connection, and occasionally breaking down and going out to the car to listen to staticky AM radio broadcasts.

I'm still trying to figure out if I have anything useful to express about this thing, beyond a general feeling of dread and a muted sense of hope that's it's going to be over in a few days. But it's surreal to be so isolated these last few days, after having watched the news networks build up to this story so relentlessly over the past months. (I loved how CNN's special ticker was promising the "latest news from Showdown Iraq," as though Showdown Iraq was the name of the event itself.) But on the whole, I think I'm better off not glued to the TV for once. It was a lovely, if incredibly muddy, early-spring day today, and we spent most of it chasing our son out of giant puddles. Beats Wolf Blitzer in a gas mask any day.

A Turing Test for sports

Since the president last night put us on a frightening countdown to war, I'm trying to stay focused on the countdowns that usually obsess me this time of year: to spring, of course, but also the start of the baseball season. This experiment by the folks at EA Sports put me right in the mood: they simulated the entire upcoming season -- all 162 games, plus playoffs and World Series -- using the Playstation 2 version MVP Baseball 2003. The results are entirely plausible, except for the part about Boston winning the AL East. (Gratuitous dig at Red Sox fans, can't help myself.)

It's not the first time this has been done, but I always find these experiments fascinating, because they highlight a property of sports in general that we don't normally talk about: their computability. A simulation will never predict with 100% accuracy an upcoming season, but it will have an easier time with some sports, and a harder time with others. I suspect this is largely a measure of the role of randomness in a particular sport. Baseball has a huge amount of randomness game to game. You need 162 baseball games to figure out the best team, because on any given day, the best team could easily lose to the worst team, whereas in football, the best team in the league will rarely lose to the worst. (This is one reason why purists object to wild cards -- the 162 game evaluation means less and less the more teams make it to the playoffs.) In individual sports, there is quite a bit of variation as well: assuming they like the surface they're playing on, the number one seed in tennis will win a major tournament probably 25-50% of the time. In golf, the number one player historically has been lucky to win 10% of the majors he's played in. That's one reason Tiger Wood's record thus far is so incredible: his winning record in the majors looks more like a tennis champ's than a golfer's.

Social networks

My new Discover column is online. This month's topic is the wonderful world of social network mapping software. Here's the opening:

In his classic novel Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut explains how the world is divided into two types of social organizations: the karass and the granfalloon. A karass is a spontaneously forming group, joined by unpredictable links, that actually gets stuff done? as Vonnegut describes it, "a team that do[es] God's Will without ever discovering what they are doing." A granfalloon, on the other hand, is a "false karass," a bureaucratic structure that looks like a team but is "meaningless in terms of the ways God gets things done."...

For most of the past 50 years, computers have been on the side of the granfalloons, good at maintaining bureaucratic structures and blind to more nuanced social interactions. But a new kind of software called social-network mapping promises to change all that. Instead of polishing up the org chart, the new social maps are designed to locate karasses wherever they emerge.

Thanks to my NYU students for reminding me of the Vonnegut connection...

Vanity Site, Cont.

Here are a few things you can read about me and my work online:

"Maybe you're like me and you used Steven Johnson's exhausting writing as a sleep aid. When Feed folded, it saddened me that I'd have to start drinking more or buy some Tylenol PM."

"Steven Johnson's Emergence is a very bad book, shallow, careless, and disappointing.... In short, Mr. Johnson gives new meaning to the phrase 'born yesterday,' a degree of ignorance and juvenile solipsism that borders on arrogance."

"Emergence presents no insight, depth, or even meaningful speculation about this wonderful field."

Okay, now that we've gotten those delightful comments out of the way (I always saw my writing as more Aleve than Tylenol PM, but what can I say?) I wanted to point you to a very generous "appreciation" of my work that just went up a few days ago. (Permalinks don't seem to be working, so scroll down a few entries to read it.) I'm linking to this not just because it's very flattering, but mainly because it highlights something I've tried very hard to do with my writing (and with FEED) -- namely, build a bridge between my background in cultural theory and my current foreground of science and technology issues. Too often, I think, those two worlds are seen as fundamentally incompatible with each other, when in fact there are many productive commonalities between them. I wrote about this a little in my response to John Brockman's New Humanists essay, and one of these days I'm going to get around to writing a longer version of the argument. The most interesting writing today, in my humble opinion, is material that connects the insights of science and culture, rather than using one to dismantle the other. Think of a book like Michael Pollan's wonderful Botany Of Desire, which is equally informed by Nietzche and Richard Dawkins. Or on the more academic side, Manuel De Landa's 1,000 Years Of Non-Linear History, which is half Deleuze and half Santa Fe Institute.

With any luck, the new book I'm working on will be a useful addition to this growing field. But that's probably just my juvenile solipsism talking.

Updated, March 11, 4:00 PM: Thanks to everyone writing in with sympathy notes about those first three quotes, but no worries -- I couldn't be happier with the reviews and reception for Emergence. I just didn't feel like I could link to an "appreciation" of me without prefacing it with some contrary opinions. It just seemed too self-congratulatory without some kind of buffer -- and plus, I liked the first quote about the Tylenol PM. It's always nice to hear that you're indirectly keeping someone on the sauce...

Blogger, Google, Memex

My new piece in Slate is a commentary on the Blogger/Google deal, but it's probably better seen as the latest installment in a near-decade-long quest that I've been on (at FEED, in various talks I've given, and in my first book) to demonstrate the ways in which the Web still doesn't measure up to Vannevar Bush's original vision of the Memex. Here's the gist:

Up to now, Google's services have revolved entirely around organizing and packaging the Web so that you can better find information--whether in the form of its flagship search tool, or the Google News service, or its online shopping experiment, Froogle. But Google has not yet ventured into managing the information and surfing history of individual users. If Google went in this direction with the Blogger acquisition, it would hearken back to one of the seminal documents of the computing age: Vannevar Bush's 1946 " As We May Think " essay, which envisioned a new tool to augment human memory.... In one crucial respect, Bush's vision differed from today's Web: He placed great importance on the trails created as the user moved through information space, assuming that a record of those trails would be of great use in amplifying the signal of human memory... I've now spent the past eight years exploring the Web practically every day, and over that time I've probably stumbled across thousands of documents that were worth preserving, yet the tools I have for organizing that history are minimal at best. Bookmarks are helpful if you're tracking a dozen sites, but beyond useless if you're managing 10,000. If Google can organize the entire Web with such efficacy, imagine what it could do with a much smaller subset of documents.

Props to the always insightful Matt Webb for making the first Google/Memex connection shortly after the deal was announced.

Updated: March 7, 10:50 AM: Ted Weinstein's post in response to this article made me realize that I should have been clearer about one thing: I don't think that this should be Google's default strategy for everyone using their service. That would raise legitimate privacy concerns and be wildly resource intensive on their end. It should be an opt-in product, and maybe even one you have to pay for.

TED Exit Poll

Just arrived back from a week on the West Coast, spent mostly luxuriating in the TED Conference, which was an utter joy to attend. Interestingly, it seems to have been very lightly blogged, given its technology focus and the wifi network set up in the downstairs "simulcast" auditorium. So here are a couple of impressions/highlights...

First, there was very little pure salesmanship on the stage, at least in the form of someone pitching a product that they were trying largely to make money off of. Dean Kamen (who tooled around on a Segway the entire week) talked about his portable Stirling Engine/Water Purification system, which he no doubt intends to make money off, but it was pretty clear from the talk -- which was note-perfect -- that what was driving him was a progressive, world-improving vision, not a profit motive. Most of the talks were either dire forecasts about our near and long-term future or uplifting glimpses of ideas that might keep that future from happening. In between were a few celebrations of amazing-tech-for-amazing-tech's-sake, and some wonderful performances. You know you're at a pretty unusual conference when Thomas Dolby is the guy on the side of the stage playing a keyboard to let the speakers know they have only two minutes left for their talks.

A few specific items:

A number of presenters introduced a slide by saying, "this is the most important graph you'll see all year." But by my lights the most compelling -- and terrifying -- one was shown early on by Laurie Garrett: what demographers are calling the "chimney" effect in Africa's population. It basically shows two populations superimposed over each other: the population of Africa with AIDS, and what it would have been like without AIDS. It's basically a society of infants, teenagers and grandparents with almost no one in between -- no 20-50 year-olds to create a workforce or educate the kids. Absolutely gruesome.

On a lighter note, Marvin Minsky walked through a couple of half-serious ideas for combating the population explosion -- ideas that he seemed a little surprised that no one was yet exploring. My favorite: make people smaller! If we're going to be able to genetically engineer ourselves, maybe we should work on shrinking ourselves down so the planet can fit more of us. As Minsky pointed out, a 6-inch person is a thousand times smaller, volume-wise, than a normal-sized one. Of course, he didn't get into the crucial corollary problem we'd have to solve if we pulled this off -- namely, Giant Killer Squirrels -- but I'm sure with time we could solve that one too.

The first day ended with a one-two punch that you probably won't see again. DJ Spooky as an opening act for Freeman Dyson. I loved Dyson's idea that if the universe doesn't turn out to be teeming with life, perhaps then it should be up to us to plant the seeds, by sending out extremophile sunflowers capable of thriving in the cold vacuum of space.

Mitch Kapor gave a great talk on his open source Chandler project, and I grilled Mitch over lunch about all the features I wanted to see show up in the final version. No matter what I threw at him, he'd say: "That's easy -- of course you'll be able to do that in Chandler." In other words, I can't wait.

Only real disappointment: Brian Eno, who was supposed to be part of the Emergence panel, canceled at the last minute, because his opposition to the war made traveling to America and talking about music seem intolerable. I understand the sentiment, but I don't think any of us would have objected if he had come and thundered against the war instead of talking about music (as many of the presenters chose to do.)

My talk would have been familiar to readers of this blog: after a little intro on why NYC was so resilient in the immediate wake of 9/11, I talked about all the interesting emergent things happening on the web right now: I did a little bit on two-way links, a little Googleshare fun, a lot of Technorati plugs (Sifry, you owe me big time!), and ended with a recap of the power law debate, which no one else mentioned on the stage. I think it went over pretty well -- I'd preloaded it with some very nice Keynote visual effects and a couple of meta-conference jokes that I knew would work, so I actually found myself really looking forward to getting up on stage. I don't think I've ever given a talk in front of a crowd where so many people had read my book -- lots of wonderful conversations with new folks telling me how Emergence had inspired them. Very rewarding all around.

Updated March 7, 11:00 AM: Here's a snapshot of me giving my talk -- note my lovely Keynote presentation in the background.