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CONTROL

                     Thu Dec 19, 2002
    
In praise of Kevin Kelly's   
book "Out of Control"...   
         
Okay, maybe you wince at Kevin Kelly's      
name these days...  who could blame      
you?  There's that embarassing "Long      
Boom" article, and the rotgut vodka      
ads he did.  Does he have any         
credibility left at all?              
                                              
   But turn your mind back before those         
   days, and for the moment pretend you         
   don't reflexively flush anything    
   associated with "Wired" magazine.         
   Take a look at his writings         
   published back in the pre-dotty days         
   of 1994: "Out of Control".          
                                              
    
There's a lot of good stuff here about   
evolved systems (as opposed to designed   
ones).  Lots of interesting pop-science               
writing about ecological research,              A celtic-knot is used   
software, communications, networks, and         as bullet-point   
so on... all on the general theme of            through-out the book,   
emergent order, self-organization.              an elegant symbol of   
                                                an organic networked   
                                                whole.               
                                                   
                                                        
Just one bit: Chapter 20 "The                       There is one quirk   
Butterfly Sleeps" focuses on                        of this book that   
some work of Stuart Kauffman,                       gives me pause:   
looking at the adaptability of                                     
a network as a function of a                        The application of 
connectivity parameter.  His                        these ideas to         
result is that adaptability                         economics seems           
peaks at an optimum amount of                       obvious, but it's  
interconnection: it's weak                          barely mentioned in    
both for poorly connected                           the text.          
systems *and* for highly                                                  
connected ones.                                         Where's the libertarian
                                                        free market polemic   
                                                        to go with the rest 
    "Kauffman's Law states that above a certain         of it? 
    point, increasing richness of connections                                 
    between agents freezes adaptation.  Nothing            Charitable thought: 
    gets done because too many actions hinge on            he figured the book 
    too many other contradictory actions.  In              was too long as is. 
    the landscape metaphor, ultra-connectance                            
    produces ultra-ruggedness, making any move             Uncharitable (?):   
    a likely fall off a peak of adaptation into            He was trying to   
    a valley of nonadaption.  Another way of               be subversive.   
    putting it, too many agents have a say in              He wanted to get   
    each other's work, and bureaucratic rigor              the old Whole   
    mortis sets in.  Adaptability conks out                Earth crowd   
    into gridlock.  For a contemporary culture             excited about the   
    primed to the virtues of connecting up,                idea of ecological 
    this low ceiling of connectivity comes as              emergent systems   
    unexpected news."  p. 400                              without revealing   
                                                           at first that   
                                                           it undercut their   
   "We own the technology to connect                       lefty political   
   everyone to everyone, but those of                      prejudices.      
   us who have tried living that way                          
   are finding that we are                                 
   disconnecting to get anything                           
   done."     p. 401                                       
                                                           
                                                           
                      
               Now take another look at those              
               cell-phone zombies, eyes glazed             
               over, grinning idiotically with a           
               phone glued to their ear.                   
                                                           
                                                           
                                                    NEUTRAL
                                                           
                                                           
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