The Age of the Unthinkable (16 page)

New-math combinations are all around us now. They are being created deep inside systems of finance or warfare to produce surprise
and newness at an accelerating pace. They torch many of our old ideas about how to conduct diplomacy, manage the global economy,
or imagine our future. They are the reason financial executives can insist their firms are safe, only to see them blow up
weeks later, as previously unlinked risks mash into each other. They explain how leaders in places such as the United States
and Israel can launch wars only to find their best plans quickly undermined and destroyed. Understanding mashup logic is,
we will see, the first step toward a new, deep security in which our ideas match the world around us.

The word “mashup” gets its hipster ring from its roots in 1990s dance music, when DJs were taking musical snippets called
samples and combining them into music that was wholly different than the original source material. When DJ Cheekyboy mixed,
say, music from Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” with tracks by the South Los Angeles rappers N.W.A. into a new track called
“Smells Like Compton,” it was hard to say what exactly you were left with. Not the anguished grunge of Nirvana or the street-fighting
crip hop of N.W.A. It was a musical swinger-totter. Same with tracks like Cabaret Voltaire’s “Low Cool,” which mixes techno
beats and recorded street talk to produce something that is as much sociology as chill-out music. The most famous mashup in
this spirit was a 2004 album by a Brooklyn DJ named Brian Burton, who goes by the
nom de spin
of Danger Mouse. Burton took the Beatles’
White Album
and mashed it into Jay-Z’s
Black Album
to produce
The Gray Album
. The idea sounds hardly plausible: weave two megahit records, separated by decades on the fast-moving river of popular culture,
into something coherent and interesting. Yet this is exactly what Danger Mouse did, to great effect.
Entertainment Weekly
called it the Best Album of 2004, ahead of some of the most expensively produced records of the year. Danger Mouse had done
the mixing in his bedroom.

Mashups capture a sense of creativity that passes established borders, that combines a sort of deep, curious yearning —
how do I get my wife to like the video game I am making? how can I strike the Americans? how can I make a fortune?
— with a hands-on, practical tinkerer’s spirit. But when these two are wedded, innovation becomes inevitable. Our world abounds
in mashups. They are often harmless and delightful, as when the Spanish chef Ferran Adrià packs his kitchen with chemists,
centrifuges, and other accoutrements of a research lab to produce “molecular cuisine” delicacies like passion-fruit caviar.
But many mashups are life-changing. They emerge in the combination of data processing and biology to track genetic diseases,
or of short messaging and epidemiology to control the spread of disease in Africa, or of financial markets and credits for
carbon pollution. They are part of the reason, as we saw in our discussion of Gorbachev and the Cold War, that it’s impossible
to conclusively say one ideology, ours, has “won” some sort of global bakeoff. The ceaseless combining of ideas, which will
be mixed and matched as people look for sensible ways to fit their hopes and faith and fears into a coherent political order,
assures a future of new and different ideologies. In this way mashups have the weird effect of making the unimaginable not
only possible but inevitable. Mash up authoritarian rule and capitalism, previously thought to be incompatible, and you get
China. Mash up high petroleum prices and caudillo politics, and you get Venezuela. Nothing is permanent in any of these mashups;
they may be gone tomorrow, mashed into some new combination. And unless we understand this mashup energy (and even learn to
use it ourselves), a truly secure future will continue to elude us.

“I would warn against attempts to forecast novel technologies by the existence of building blocks already in place,” the economist
Brian Arthur has written. He’s right. In an era of new math, simply guessing at the shape of a combination of existing blocks
tells you almost nothing about what might be built. The great thing about our future — and the terrifying thing — is that
we can’t imagine what sums the new math will yield. This sense of so many possible combinations, of a limitless dimensionality,
presents us with a staggering level of complexity. Opportunities for spectacular innovation explode around us. To call our
current financial battles or terror battles “mashup wars” would not be too far wrong, any more than calling World War I a
“Cubist war.” You can almost imagine Miyamoto or Danger Mouse watching reports of the latest improvised explosive devices
in Iraq — mashups of explosives, cell phones, and text messages — and feeling the same sinking shock Picasso must have felt
on that Paris night when he said, “Yes, it is we who made it.” Yet here is the hopeful truth: understood properly, used to
make a new kind of security, mashup energy will also let us say of a world fifty years from now, prosperous and stable, “Yes,
it is we who made it.”

The revolution under way around us isn’t something we can choose to be a part of or not. It is largely unavoidable. In this
regard it is distinct from, say, the revolutions of the nineteenth century, in which the big challenge for revolutionaries
like Marx was how to get people to care enough to act, to get involved. Today there’s no choice. We’re participants, like
it or not. It’s not as if we can wake up some morning and decide, “Okay, today’s the day I’ll start mashing up my life.” Your
life is already being mashed for you. The Internet, your derivative-laced retirement account, chemical compounds that sit
in our food or our clothing — all of these are expressions of an unstoppable, infectious genius for combinations. We’ll turn
in a moment to refining our skills for living in such a world, but the new tools we’ll need come from accepting that mashup
energy changes the ecosystem around us and, as a result, changes us. Networks of innovation we cannot see enmesh us in connections
through stock markets or gas prices or disease. The nature of these networks is often not apparent until, awkwardly, they
shift and fracture the world we thought we understood. That was what happened on 9/11 and in the financial meltdown of the
summer of 2008, when powerful-looking investment banks essentially destroyed themselves. And there will be a lot more of these
strange sums in our future.

German sociologist Ulrich Beck has called what we’re living in
Risikogesellschaft,
or “risk society,” where we all share risks, where the richest Palm Beach socialite shares health or financial risks with
the poorest of the planet’s inhabitants. Indeed, what modernity manufactures better than anything else, Beck says, is new
and incalculable risks that we all share and partake in, even if we’re not aware of them. The result, he once wrote, is that
“at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the human condition cannot be understood nationally or locally but only globally.”
The forces that shape our lives are a new-math collision of ideas that can and do come from anywhere.

The lesson of Miyamoto’s success is about the sort of astonishing revolutions that become possible once we start to make our
sums using the new math. What we are about to see is that laying the foundation for a sensible international order — one that
fits 2009, not 1989 — requires moving into areas where traditional thinkers about power are least comfortable, a whole way
of thinking where old math rules are discarded. It involves accepting that the most important things cannot be predicted with
any great accuracy. It involves radically refiguring the balance sheet of power in such a way that the aim isn’t to hoard
power but to give away as much of it as possible it can be mashed, mixed, and used in new and decent ways. It requires mastering
the notion that the most powerful action is often inaction. It will involve pursuing deliberate failure and reimagining the
kinds of violence we must use. It requires harder truth telling than our leaders are used to and experimentation right up
to the very edge of collapse. It involves moments, even, of useful panic. But — and this is crucial — it also means understanding
that mashing up is something we can do too. Our policies, dreams, and ideas can be combined to release new and unexpected
power. It is this key difference between us and passive, helpless sand grains that will mark out our ability to have a secure
future. It was unthinkable that Shigeru Miyamoto’s old technology would upend a multibillion-dollar industry overnight. And
it might be unthinkable too that we can grasp, from what seems a very dangerous and unstable world around us, a prosperous,
stable, and better future. We can. And that is where we turn now.

When Aharon Farkash was made the head of Israeli military intelligence in the winter of 2001, he was aware of one fact: of
the thirteen previous occupants of his post, six had retired or been fired before finishing their complete terms. The abrupt
dismissals were no reflection on the men’s brilliance, combat machismo, or skills as commanders. Rather, it was that the job
of heading military intelligence in Israel is perhaps the most difficult intelligence job in the world. The country is surrounded
by enemies. It must oversee parts of the West Bank of the Jordan River and the Gaza Strip which are filled with groups committed
to Israel’s destruction. The country’s foes are secretive, from cultures in which you go out killing with people you’ve known
since childhood, mistrust anyone you haven’t known for that long, and find easy financing and arms available from the running
taps of nearby oil money. These enemies often feel, deeply, that they are doing the work of God.

Since the founding of Israel in 1948, the country has been in a constant state of alert, poised for instant war, the call
for which has come more than once every decade. The nation’s intelligence services, considered to be among the best in the
world, have in fact amassed a history filled with missed signals and nearly fatal mistakes. The most famous of these was the
1973 Yom Kippur war, which came just twelve weeks after the Israeli general Moshe Dayan assured
Time
that “the next ten years will see Israel’s borders frozen along their present lines, but there will be no major war.”

Such errors were not artifacts of some distant past. In 2006 the country launched an offensive against Hizb’allah in southern
Lebanon and found itself faced with a foe that, after six weeks of what were intended to be punishing attacks, emerged triumphant
and with a bounty of Israeli tanks, transports, and even a missile-hit ship (the first time the Israeli navy had been hit
by Hizb’allah, called in near real time on TV by Nasrallah, like the Babe gesturing toward the bleachers before a home run).
These sorts of surprises, on offense or defense, were an unpleasant part of Israeli national life. Farkash once told me, “I
was at a conference reviewing Israel’s intelligence history and one of the speakers observed that of thirty important strategic
moments in Israel’s history, intelligence had failed in twenty-eight cases. The general sitting next to me leaned over and
whispered: ‘He is only saying that because he doesn’t know the details of the other two.’ ”

Farkash’s career had carried him through some of the most secretive parts of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Just prior to
taking the top intelligence job, he spent three years overseeing the highly classified Unit 8200, which recruited the best
Israeli scientists and engineers for intelligence and defense work. The nonclassified spin-offs from Unit 8200 had produced
nearly sixty civilian high-tech companies worth billions, while the still-secret work of the group included breakthroughs
that American intelligence officials described as “world-class” and, in some cases, “years ahead of the US.” When Farkash
finished his term in office — his
complete
term — in early 2006, before that disastrous Lebanon war, he had not only avoided the fate of those now-dismissed chiefs
but had established a record of devastating clarity. One of Farkash’s admirers in the Israeli policy establishment, a mutual
friend of ours, pointed out that Farkash had “covered himself in accuracy” during his term as head of military intelligence.
In the months before Operation Iraqi Freedom, the general had politely but urgently given his American counterparts a nearly
pitch-perfect play-by-play of what would happen once U.S. forces arrived in the Tigris River valley. He was ignored.

Buddhist masters like to say that if you’re trying to reach enlightenment, you must develop, in this order, “right view, right
intention, and right action.” If you’re not seeing the world properly, you have no hope of any sort of breakthrough. The question
I want to explore now is: what is right view when it comes to life in a revolutionary age? When the defining trait of life
is those sandpile developments that, by definition, are new in our experience, how should we look at the world? Do we have
anything to learn from people who are particularly successful in places where fast change and surprise are facts of daily
life? These are vitally important questions if you’re trying to train yourself to make sense of a world order that looks increasingly
out of control. If you’re running a corporation, planning for your kids’ education, figuring out what countries to bomb and
which to befriend — what should you be looking for? We’ll turn later to the other Zen-master problems of how to
think
about such a world and how to
act
in it. But if we can’t even master the art of
seeing,
then as Louis Halle said, we’re not very likely to hit what we’re aiming for.

Many of our problems today aren’t the result of too little information. Instead, they come from the challenge of sorting through
a huge (and growing) amount of data, all constantly changing, and much of it irrelevant or misleading. I had heard through
friends in both the United States and Israel about Farkash not only because he was renowned for finishing his whole term but
because he was known as one of the great instinctive spies of his generation.
Go see Farkash
was a refrain among the spies and analysts I most respected. He was someone who could see through that data haze into what
was really essential. Farkash, I was told, had a way of talking about the world, a way that sometimes even he couldn’t quite
explain, that was profoundly different from that of most everyone else in his profession. You could joke that he was the Israeli
Yoda, filled with barely scrutable insights, but his record spoke for itself. He seemed, my friends said, to have made the
uncertainty of the world around him an intuitive part of his mind. This was, they said, what we should all aspire to be. He
was the closest thing to a spy’s Zen master that I was likely to find.