stevenberlinjohnson.com

The New Book

I handed in the first draft of my new book to my editor at Scribner yesterday, after a three-month stretch of writing almost every day. So I'm feeling pretty good about things, albeit a little guilty for neglecting the blog over this past month. I've written this one in a slightly new way: charging through the chapters without doing a lot of re-reading and editing in mid-stream. When I finished a chapter, I wouldn't go back to re-read it -- I'd just load up the next one and plunge in. In the end, this enabled me to read the book with relatively fresh eyes when I finally printed the whole thing out this past weekend. Normally, you've read everything so many times by that point that it all seems either 1) incredibly dull and obvious, or 2) absolutely perfect, every word in the right place. Neither observation is helpful at that stage.

One of the great things about writing books is that the process spits out all these fun milestones, particularly at this stage: first print-out, submission of the manuscript, the index preparation, first galleys, publication, reviews, etc. I've had a tremendous amount of fun in my engagements with magazine journalism, web publishing, blogs, etc -- but I'm definitely at my happiest putting a book together. There's nothing quite like it.

With the first draft in, I'm now able to think about how the book should intersect with this site. There's still another month or two at least of serious editing and additions, so I'm very much looking for feedback at this stage. But publishing an entire draft here seems like overkill, and not really what blogs are for. (Plus I suspect my publishers wouldn't be so happy about it either.) What do you think? I'm open to suggestions. One thought I had was to say that I'd be happy to send a PDF version to folks who were really keen to read it, if they promised to give me some comments, and to buy a few copies for their friends when it came out...

As I've hinted a few times here, the book is about what brain science can teach you about yourself as an individual -- in other words, not how the brain evolved, or how the brain works in the abstract, but how your brain works. In some ways it's similar in tone to Emergence: popular science writing, with interesting little anecdotes on almost every page, and conversations with some fascinating researchers. But it's also a bit more first-person than Emergence. I personally take a number of tests, and scan my head with a number of different technologies, from neurofeedback to fMRI. I also talk a little about the way understanding something about the brain's inner reality has changed the way I approached various events in my life. The general idea is that modern brain science can be understood as an extension of what the great chroniclers of mental life -- novelists like James, or Woolf, or Joyce -- did in a literary form: helping you see your faculties of mind with a newfound clarity. Hopefully, the end result will be entertainingly self-reflective, and not annoyingly self-obsessed, but you can be the judge of that!

Baghdad Falls, redux

My post from a ten days ago on the liberation of Baghdad, and my ambivalent feelings about it, generated some very thoughtful posts and emails in response. I wanted to respond to one theme that kept appearing, which is the question of the moral right involved in overthrowing an obviously tyrannical regime (before you even get to the question of what you put up in its place.) A number of people responded to my concern about our routing around the U.N. with this consolation: what we did was ultimately the right thing to do, and so if we couldn't persuade the security council to support it, too bad for them.

The problem with this line of logic is that the world is filled with actions whose moral rectitude reasonable people disagree about. To roll out the usual examples: I happen to think that it's morally wrong to give a massive tax break to the richest 1% of the country at precisely the point at which the distribution of wealth is the most extreme it has been since the 1920s. Many, many people agree with me on this point. But quite a few disagree, and many of them have actually been elected to run the country. So odds are, they'll win out, at least in the short run.

And I'm okay with that. Because that's what democracies are all about: they're explicitly designed with the assumption that reasonable people will disagree about fundamental values. And so when one of those disagreements flares up, there's a process for dealing with it. The same goes for international conflicts. There is certainly a case -- even a progressive case -- for using military power to overthrow Hussein's regime. But there is also a case against it, and many people whose knowledge of the region and of history I greatly respect have been making that case. So you need a system to resolve these disputes, some kind of global democracy that recognizes conflicting values, and creates a process for managing them. Right now the UN is the closest thing we've got. Could it be reformed? Absolutely. It would certainly be nice if all the member states were democracies themselves. And I'm not so sure about the veto power. But unilateral action in global affairs is just as dangerous -- probably more so -- as unilateral action in national affairs. Just because something's morally right doesn't always make it the right thing to do.

Mirror, Mirror

My new "Emerging Technology" column is up at Discover -- it's a tribute to David Gelernter's 1991 classic book, Mirror Worlds, which had a huge impact on me when I originally read it in the early nineties. In the piece, I tried to talk about the ways in which Gelernter's vision hasn't yet been realized, despite the fact that all the tools are now in place for it. Here's a quote from the lead-in:

Although virtual worlds are now attracting growing audiences that rival those of some television shows, the essential component of Gelernter's vision remains unrealized. Mirror worlds were not supposed to be an escape from reality; they were supposed to reflect reality. A modern-day city generates plumes of data the way 19th-century industrial towns generated smoke. There are block-by-block crime statistics, test scores for every student in every school, traffic reports updated by the second, demographic profiles by zip code, and so on. All of those numbers exist somewhere in cyberspace, but finding them is next to impossible. Gelernter envisioned a centralized repository for all this data, a virtual reconstruction of a space that would showcase everything going on in reality. Gelernter's simulated worlds were going to be mirrors. By comparison, the simulations we have now are fantasy islands.

If you haven't read Mirror Worlds, go pick up a copy -- it's as relevant today as it was ten years ago. But in the meantime, you can enjoy my column...

Baghdad Falls

I watched the statues fall on the television today with the first genuine feeling of uplift that world news has triggered in me for months. I think even the most hardened anti-war leftist has to feel some solidarity seeing that kind of fascist iconography torn down. But I feel today about the war exactly as I did a month ago. I oppose it, even though I'm fairly confident in the long run it will be good news for the Iraqis, and maybe even for the Middle East in general. I oppose it because there has to be some kind of global system for legitimizing these military interventions, and flawed as it is, right now the U.N. is the only such system going. If we'd persuaded the security council -- and not just Tony Blair and the Marshall Islands -- that Hussein had to go, I would have supported the war. But for whatever complicated set of reasons, we failed to make the case, and we should have to live with the consequences of that. Even if it means the Iraqis are worse off for not being invaded. Because the next "liberation" on the table, as Howard Dean bravely pointed out last month, will be the Chinese finally freeing the oppressed masses of Taiwan. When that gets voted down by the security council, what are we going to do when the Chinese politely tell the security council to fuck off? (And start pouring Coca-Cola into the sewers and calling baseball "freedomball"?)

I feel about the fall of Baghdad the way I imagine I would have felt if Gore had simply ignored the Supreme Court and staged a minor coup, forcing the ascendant Bush administration out of Washington. You want your cause to win out, but when you play by the rules, and your cause doesn't win, then it's even worse to say "we don't need no stinkin' rules!" There's a case to be made for a global intervention to get rid of Saddam Hussein, if only for the local, on-the-ground benefit of the Iraqi people. But we failed to make the case. And now we're saving the town to destroy the global village. Which is great news for everybody in the town, and you can see it on their faces as they pull those statues down. But I'm not so sure about the rest of us.

My Trip To Freedom

Just returned from a three-day trip to Paris to speak at a Microsoft conference, which was held at Disneyland Paris -- as you might imagine, a strange place to find yourself in the middle of the Iraq war. I managed to squeeze in a day in Paris itself after the talk, a day that turned out to be absolute peak Paris in the spring: flowering trees everywhere and vast blue skies. I'll spare you all the pictures, but it was an exquisite day. (One that is rapidly fading from memory, given the mini-blizzard we're having right now in New York.) A couple of stray thoughts from the trip:

1. The afternoon that I arrived I made a quick excursion to the Magic Kingdom solely to go on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride. (In my experience, the EuroDisney version of Pirates is the best.) I've probably gone on that ride 25 times in my life, but this time, an entirely new thought occurred to me. Forgive the flair for the obvious here, but those pirates are terrorizing that town: they're firing on it with huge cannons; they're setting fire to houses; they're drunkenly chasing after local women, presumably to rape them; they're shooting off weapons indiscriminately into open windows. If you think about people in the actual Caribbean towns hundreds of years ago, being attacked by pirates must have been just about one of the most terrifying things you could imagine. Pirates were the Al Qaeda of the 18th century. But on the ride, they're not even supposed to be scary; it's all played for comic relief. All of which made me wonder: in two hundred years, when we've all moved on to new fears (gray goo and sentient machines, no doubt) will Disney roll out a new set of rides? Suicide Bombers of the Middle East? Terrorists of New York?

2. I'm always struck by this when I visit France, and this trip was no exception. We may be lagging behind the French in our social safety net, our wines and cheeses, and the beauty of our cities, but the one area that we are clearly superior to them is technology that prevents water from spilling out all over the bathroom when you take a shower. My hotel had a small pane of glass practically the size of a car window anchored to the nozzle-side of the shower, and nothing else. Is there some kind of embargo in France that's keeping shower curtains out of the country? I took a five minute shower and when I got out the bathroom looked like the set of The Poseidon Adventure.

3. I watched a little of the BBC World coverage, and it was immediately apparent how different the angle of presentation was. You couldn't watch for more than a few minutes without seeing an Iraqi corpse. The overall threshold of permissible violence was much higher than on the US networks, which made it quite gruesome to watch. (Appropriately so, of course.) The interesting thing was that having established a stronger connection to the Iraqi point of view made the broadcasts actually more sympathetic to the American cause, because you were able to get a closer look at Iraqi soldiers explaining how they didn't want to be fighting, and how they were hoping that the Americans would arrive sooner rather than later.

4. On the Air France flight back, the flight attendant voiceover gave the standard spiel about how this was a non-smoking flight, and tampering with smoke detectors in the bathroom would make you "lee-able" for prosecution. And then they said, "If you would like a nicotine supplement at any time, please ask your flight attendant and we'll be happy to provide you with one." Maybe Mayor Bloomberg should institute a comparable program for New York City's newly smoke-free bars...

Operation Desert Swarm

Treating war like a videogame is generally considered to be a sign of simulation society degradation, but in today's USA Today, Kevin Maney makes the case for why the US war planners could have learned a thing or two from The Sims, by seeing the Iraqi system as more decentralized, and less vulnerable to "decapitation" than it initially appeared. The argument will be familiar to Emergence readers, and in fact there are a few nice shout-outs to the book and a couple of quotes from me. (Once again, I'm partially responsible for injecting discussions of ant colonies into a context where they are usually not invoked.) I think Maney is on to something here. Given Hussein's no-show at his own speech yesterday, it's becoming entirely possible that 1) he's been dead the whole time, and 2) the Iraqi forces nevertheless managed to fight more fiercely than we expected, despite the fact that the command-control centers have been devastated by the air campaign. It's well known that Saddam likes to style himself (and his statues) after Stalin, but maybe he's been learning a few swarm warfare moves from Osama over the past decade.