Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now (31 page)

Trust him? It’s hard not to—particularly when I take into account that he’s living in a world where he’s expected to accomplish more tasks each minute than I did in an hour or a whole day at his age. Functioning in such a world does require getting the “gist” of things and moving on, recognizing patterns, and then inferring the rest. It’s the sort of intellectual fakery my college friend Walter Kirn describes in the novelized account of his education,
Lost in the Meritocracy
, in which the protagonist succeeds brilliantly at Princeton by faking it. He explains with a mix of pride and self-contempt:

I came to suspect that certain professors were on to us, and I wondered if they, too, were actors. In classroom discussions, and even when grading essays, they seemed to favor us over the hard workers, whose patient, sedimentary study habits were ill adapted, I concluded, to the new world of antic postmodernism that I had mastered almost without effort.
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What may have begun as a fakery, though, became a skill itself—a way of recognizing patterns and then surfing through a conversation in an increasingly convoluted, overlapping, and interdisciplinary academic world. Kirn graduated summa cum laude with a scholarship to Oxford and became a respected author and critic. This wide-angle approach may be not the only skill one needs to meet intellectual challenges, but it’s as crucial to understanding and performance as is focused study. The truly accomplished musician can do more than play his repertoire; he can also pick up a “fake book” and instantly play one of thousands of tunes by scanning a melody and chord chart. He knows enough of the underlying patterns to fill in the rest.

This more generalist and intuitive perspective—the big view, if you will—has been studied extensively by University of Michigan psychologist Richard Nisbett. Like Tetlock, Nisbett found that inductive logic was being undervalued in decision making and that people’s reasoning would be vastly improved by weighing the odds and broadening focus, rather than just relying on highly defined expertise and prior experiences.

After noticing how differently his Chinese graduate students approached certain kinds of problems, Nisbett decided to compare the ways East Asians and Westerners perceive and think. He showed students pictures of animals in their natural environments and tracked their eye movements as they scanned the images. While his American students invariably looked at the animal first, and only then took time to look at the background, his Asian students looked at the forest or field first. When they did finally look at the tiger or elephant, they spent much less time on it than their American counterparts. When asked about the pictures later, the American students had much better recall of the specific objects they had seen, but the Chinese could recount the background in great detail. Nisbett could even fool his Asian students into believing they hadn’t seen an image before, simply by changing the background. He did the same thing to the Americans: when he completely changed the environment but left the subject animal alone, they had no idea the picture had changed. They were fixated on the focal point and blind to the greater environment.

Westerners tended to focus on objects and put them into categories, while Easterners looked at backgrounds and considered bigger environmental forces. Westerners used formal logic to figure things out, while Easterners used a variety of strategies. As Nisbett explains, “East Asians reason holistically—that is, they focus on the object in its surrounding field, there is little concern with categories or universal rules, and behavior is explained on the basis of the forces presumed to be operative for the individual case at a particular time. Formal logic is not much used and instead a variety of dialectic reasoning types are common, including synthesis, transcendence and convergence.”
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These pairs—the American and the Asian, the hedgehog and the fox, the expert and the generalist—suggest two main ways of managing and creating change: influence the players or manipulate the greater environment. When we focus on the pieces, we are working in what could be considered the timescape of
chronos
: we break objects down into their parts, study them carefully, focus in, and engage with the pieces scientifically. Like dissection, it works best when the subjects are dead. When we focus on the space around the pieces, we have shifted to the time sensibility of
kairos
. The space between things matters more than the things themselves. We are thinking less about tinkering with particular objects than about recognizing or influencing the patterns they create and the connections they make. We stop getting dizzy following the path of every feedback loop and pull back to see the patterns those loops create.

In a more practical sense, it’s the difference between trying to change your customer’s behavior by advertising to him, or changing the landscape of products from which he has to choose; trying to convince people in a foreign nation to like you by crafting new messaging, or simply building a hospital for them; planning by committee where to pave the paths on a new college campus, or watching where the grass has been worn down by footsteps and putting the paths there.

As economist and policy consultant Joshua Ramo puts it, focusing on the environment gives one access to the “slow variables” that matter so much more in the long run than surface noise. His book
The Age of the Unthinkable
is directed primarily at policy makers and military strategists, but his insights apply widely to the culture of the fractal. In language likely surprising to his own community of readers, Ramo suggests leaders develop “empathy.” He doesn’t mean just crying at the misfortune of others but rather learning how to experience the world through the sensibilities of as many other people as possible.

Ramo is particularly intrigued by a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, Sequoia Capital partner Michael Moritz, a very early and successful investor in Google and YouTube. Unlike most of his peers, Moritz did not break down companies or technologies in order to understand them. “Moritz’s genius was that he wasn’t cutting companies up as he looked at them but placing them in context. The forces shaping a technology market, consumer demands, changes in software design, shifts in microchip pricing, the up-and-down emotions of a founder—he was watching all of these for signs of change.”
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Moritz understood Google’s single-pointed vision to index the Web but insisted that the only path to that goal was to constantly improvise. In order to lead his companies through the kinds of changes they needed to make, he believed he needed to understand their goals as well as the founders did. He required the ability to lose himself in their dreams. “The thing I am terrified of is losing that empathy,” Moritz explains. “The best investments we have missed recently came because the founders came in here and we blew them off because we didn’t understand them. We couldn’t empathize. That is a fatal mistake. If I were running American foreign policy, I would want to focus on empathizing.”
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Empathy isn’t just studying and understanding. It’s not something one learns but a way of feeling and experiencing others. It’s like the difference between learning how to play a song and learning how to resonate with one that’s already being played. It is less about the melody than the overtones. Or in networking terms, less about the nodes than the connections between them.

My own Zen master of such connections is Jerry Michalski, a technology analyst who used to edit Esther Dyson’s
Release 1.0
newsletter and then left to go into what seemed to me to be a sort of public reclusiveness. I’d see him at almost every technology or digital culture conference I could make time to attend, usually because I was doing a talk or panel myself. Jerry seemed content to attend for attendance’ sake. He’d just sit there with his laptop, tapping away during everyone’s speeches, actually reading the PowerPoint slides people put up behind them, and, later, Tweeting quotes and re-Tweeting those quoted by others.

I first met Jerry when I sat next to him at a conference in Maine in 1998, shortly after he had resigned from his editorial post. We were listening to someone I don’t remember speak about something I can’t recall. What I do remember is that I peeked down to see what he was writing on his computer. It wasn’t text at all, but a visualized web of connections between words. “It’s called TheBrain,”
²²
Jerry told me. He would enter a name, a fact, a company—whatever. And then he’d connect it to the other things, people, books, ideas, in his system already. He put me in, added my speaking and literary agents, connected me to my books, my influences, my college, as well as some of the ideas and terms I had coined. “I think it might be useful for understanding what’s going on.”

As of today, Jerry has over 173,000 thoughts in his brain file, and 315,000 links between them, all created manually.
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And he is finally emerging from his public reclusiveness to share what he learned with the rest of us. His chief insight, as he puts it, is that “everything is deeply intertwingled.” He no longer thinks of any thought or idea in isolation, but in context. Jerry describes himself as a pattern finder and lateral thinker. Everything matters only insofar as its relationship to everything else.

Surprisingly, offloading his memory to the computer in this fashion has not damaged his recall, but improved it. The act of storing things in relationship to other things has reinforced their place in his real brain’s memory. And going back into TheBrain “refreshes my neural pathways.” They are not random facts but parts of the greater fabric—components in the greater pattern.

Most important, however, Michalski has become a great advocate for what he calls “The Relationship Economy”—the economy of how people are connected to one another. As he and microfinance innovator April Rinne explained in a recent
Washington Post
op-ed, “Say, for example, you are trying to solve a complex problem such as the global financial crisis. Do you ask an economist, a sociologist or a political scientist? Each of them individually is too constrained. The more multi-faceted the problem, the more forces intersect and the more challenges one must face within a siloed system.”
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On the one hand, this means democratizing innovation and change—not crowdsourcing, per say, where you just get customers to do your advertising work for you—but creating an environment where everyone connected with a culture or industry feels welcome to participate in its development. It’s the way amateur gearheads develop the best new technologies for cycling, which are then incorporated into the designs and products of major manufacturers. It’s the way Adobe encourages the users of its programs to create their own plug-ins, which are then shared online or incorporated into the next release. It’s the way Google provides free online tutorials on how to make Android apps, in the hope that an open development culture can eventually beat Apple’s “walled garden” of more professionally devised products.

On the other hand, it means coming to understand that—at least in the fractal—one’s relationships matter more than one’s accumulated personal knowledge; the shared overtakes the owned; connections supersede the ego. Contrast, for example, Michalski’s selfless Brain to Microsoft’s celebration of individual immortality online, the MyLifeBits project. In this public display of solipsism, we are encouraged to marvel at and model the behavior of researcher Dr. Gordon Bell, who has scanned, recorded, and uploaded everything he can about himself—lectures, memos, letters, home movies, phone calls, voice-mail—since 1998.
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The reward for turning his entire life into bits is that Microsoft’s archival software will then allow him to access anything he has done or seen, at any time in his life.

The promise is that, through computers, we gain a perfect memory. Bell and Microsoft claim they are realizing Vannevar Bush’s original 1950s dream for personal computing, which was to externalize one’s memory into a perfect record: total recall. In reality, of course, the project models and publicizes a mode of behavior that would make a market researcher drool. This is the Facebook reality, in which we operate under the false assumption that we are the users of the platform, when we are actually the product being sold. Moreover, on a subtler level, it uses computers to heighten the sense that we are what we perceive and experience as individuals, and that the recordable bits of information about ourselves reflects who we are. The marketer loves data on individuals, since it’s individuals who can be influenced to make purchases. The market loves individuals, too, since the less networked people are, the less they share and the more they have to buy for themselves.

More important, however, as an approach to a postnarrative world in which living networks replace linear histories, MyLifeBits is entirely more vulnerable to fractalnoia than TheBrain. For Michalski, the “self” is defined by connections. TheBrain isn’t about him, but about everyone else he has met. It is not limited to a single path, but instead suggests an infinity of possible pathways through data. The patterns are out there, constantly evolving and becoming increasingly “intertwingled.” It’s all potential energy. Maintaining this state—this readiness-is-all openness—isn’t easy, but it’s the only way to create context without time.

MyLifeBits, on the other hand, approaches memory as the storage of a personal narrative over time. It is not really stored potential energy as much as a record of spent kinetic energy. It is a diary, both egocentric and self-consumed. Moreover, once stored, it is locked down. History no longer changes with one’s evolving sensibilities; it describes limits and resists reinterpretation. One’s path narrows. As far as doing pattern recognition in a landscape of present shock, the user must identify entirely with sequences of self. Everything relates, as long as it relates back to himself. Where was I when I saw that? How did I think of that the first time I did it? How does that reflect on me?