Moment by moment, the writing is quite decent, but I had to look hard to find anything of substance here. The fundamental 'conceit' [technical term] of the essay is incredibly well-worn, and it is surprising to see it reproduced here so uncritically. There is one substantive and interesting claim, based on research by two scientists named Wayne Gray and Wai-Tat Fu: “externalized knowledge is accessed like any other memory, and that we treat ‘memories’ on a computer screen just like memories in our head.” This is joined to the suggestion from Edwin Hutchins that the ‘cognitive task’ of navigation at sea was socially distributed across “several people, charts, papers, clocks, and a variety of physical instruments.” As ships in truth use GPS, and used radio beacons before then, and as in truth a single man with a map, a compass and sextant can roughly determine the position of a ship at sea, this sounds suspiciously like a thesis that is picking and choosing its own Scotsmen. What exactly makes a distributed task be cognitive rather than, say, a computation? I do not think that this is answered, and it seems that the entire idea never gets beyond an “A implies B, C implies B, therefore A is C” fallacy.
Anyway, what excites the author is the idea that this external cognitive process extends seamlessly into the internal cognitive process by way of the aforementioned findings about externalized knowledge. There is no real notion beyond that. He believes that as the city population grows larger and denser, the “genius” of the metaphorical city mind will increase; he cites strong evidence that this is true, but he attributes the solved logistics and communications of a large city to that genius, no matter that a mind is capable of no similar thing. If “people are to cities as neurons are to brains,” and based on the power-law scaling he mentions, he logically ought to end with the fear that all large cities will be eventually destroyed by massive epileptic cascades. Instead, he does the usual soft-shoe across different scales and concepts to freshen up an old and familiar imagination of science.
I have no idea why this is about San Francisco, although the golden gate bridge is quite obviously a corpus callosum.
Interesting thoughts--thanks for sharing. If one wished to read further on this topic, are there any resources you would recommend?
Also, your comment about epileptic cascades made me think... Could it be that political and socioeconomic struggle and headbutting within a city is a sign of that?
The light bulb was also an iteration, and no Edison was not the inventor. Humphrey Davy (1802) was (or Warren de la Rue (1840) if you count the inclusion of a bulb as a necessary distinguishing feature), and at least 22 people contributed to iterations on the idea before Edison and Swan commercialized it.
Edison contributed a lot to the iterations that made incandescent light, phonographs and video production possible, but he certainly was not the sole inventor that people make him out to be. He was basically the first Steve Jobs. Shrewd business person, yes. Iterator, yes. Sole inventor, no.
IMHO the myth of the sole inventor is one of the most destructive/unproductive notions I've encountered since it gives some very smart people the false impression that not only do they not need to work cooperatively with others, but that they might even be hindered by working with anyone not equally as brilliant as themselves. It's a myth that produces a toxic attitude that squanders the talents of some of the most talented.
Yeah, the smartphone was not such a big leap as it's made out to be. It was mainly UI. I used to have a Sony Ericsson dumbphone and I had Opera Mini and Google Maps on it. I ordered train tickets online with that phone.
NB: Not sure why you were down voted, it was a perfectly valid comment.
I agree with you. I guess I'm just giving the author a little credit: I think he understands the iPhone itself isn't an invention but that things like multi-touch displays were invented to make it possible. They didn't just take available parts and put them together, they had to invent stuff which would come together to create something. The comparison to the bulb is unfair as that is a 'simple' object (it does one thing, has one function).
Strange article. The article is trying to say something about collaboration and then somehow leaps to cities being good for collaboration.
This claim is made despite abundant evidence that the greatest tech innovations in Silicon Valley did not occur in the city, but the much more mundane suburbs and universities.
This trend has largely continued because cities are poor environments for "innovation" - higher cost of living, less space for tinkering and equipment, and lower "neighborly" sentiment which is required for collaboration.
> … cities … lower "neighborly" sentiment which is required for collaboration
I've found this to be the opposite in comparing cities to suburbs.
If you're referring to the tech startups that created silicon valley, and why they started where they started, you really can't ignore the subsidized land granted through the university system.
The point Jane Jacobs makes about innovation and cities is that old buildings are essential. Basically, you need clusters of places with cheap rent. If all the real estate is new and shiny and impressive and nice, it's only going to be available to businesses that are already firing on all cylinders. And that's great for them, for a while. But the other point she makes is that nothing lasts forever. The conditions that make a business work will eventually change, and in most cases, the kinds of business that worked well at one time won't be able to adapt to another. They'll just go away.
If the city in which this constant drama is playing out has a decent stock of old buildings, there's a good chance that there will be another generation of businesses that are better attuned to the times who are ready to move into the high-rent districts. But if a city falls prey to short-term thinking and allows all its cheap neighborhoods to be gobbled up by rapacious developers, it's going to find itself driving off a cliff in terms of long range economic viability.
In agricultural terms, getting rid of cheap rents is like eating your seed stock. In more vivid terms, it's like setting your house on fire to stay warm in the winter.
This whole idea is similar to the one Robert Pirsig explored in his book Lila, the less-well-known sequel to his famous "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance."
He explored the idea of evolution at many levels for a whole chapter, pondering about how the concept of evolution has itself evolved. From pure energy, atoms "evolved" in a sense. Those atoms accumulated in a sort of physical evolution into larger bodies; stars, asteroids, and planets. Stars fused atoms into larger, more complex atoms. Planets congealed and evolved on a geologic scale, the Earth specifically forming mountains, rivers, oceans. In that form, molecules evolved further and increased in complexity and organization into amino acids, and life itself, which evolved in the sense with which we're more familiar, from single cells, to multicellular organisms, to a myriad of forms, and finally into sentient humans.
The evolution, however, has not stopped as we normally assume. Instead, humans are and have been only atomic parts of the phase of evolution in which we're currently taking part, where we surpass the limits of our biology and evolve in a social way, and then a technological way, to form a being far greater than any single one of us. We are networked like a giant brain would be, we have information from the far reaches of the world at our fingertips, the ability to coordinate and execute incredible feats, and surely the ability to grow and spread and prosper as never before.
This is the evolution of the universe. Each phase happens at a more and more rapid pace than the one before, and each increases in the complexity and capability of the organism as a whole. For some reason, despite entropy and the supposed tendency of the universe to randomize, it turns out it has a surprising tendency to organize in spite of itself.
So yes, the city is in essence a big brain that can solve big problems. The whole world is, and all of history has been leading up to this. What will we do with it?
Take them as you will. Is it a perfect analogue? Of course not, but it is a striking fractal self-similarity that illustrates the types of structures that tend to form in the universe. Who is to say that a city is not a form of brain; or the globe, networked in much the same way? Or the universe for that matter, massive clusters connected by vast filaments of matter held together by gravity and energy itself?
Each part, at every scale, centers around the transfer and storage of information. What is this thing, this universe, that has formed these patterns at so many levels?
Just a counter point, whenever anybody wants to solve really hard problems, the think tank, lab, whatever that's setup to do the solving is very rarely near a city.
For what it's worth [], I'm pretty sure CERN(/LHC), ESRF, SLAC Nat. Accelerator Labs, Lawrence Livermore, Lawrence Bekeley, Sandia, Princeton Plasma Phys. Lab, Brookhaven, Fermilab, Argonne Nat. Lab, TRIUMF, Sudbury Neutrino Observatory, Oak Ridge, Research Triangle Park, various institutions within the Max Planck Society, Institute for Advanced Study, Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, RAND Corporation, (and likely many others...), all have/had facilities within (at most) 100 km of a city with a population of at least 150,000 people. Several of these institutions are within commuting distance of major world cities.
In the set of nation state funded research facilities (e.g. funded by US Dept. of Energy, European Research Council, etc.) I'm willing to bet that most of the facilities are more often relatively near cities (greater than 150K pop). Many (high energy / high capital cost) facilities, employ on the orders of 1-10K staff alone.
[] (... and that Basic Science, High Energy Physics, Computational Science, Basic Tech, Corporate Research, and/or Public Policy/Economic/GeoPol research are the hard problem spaces you are alluding to...)
> have/had facilities within (at most) 100 km of a city with a population of at least 150,000 people.
I mean, yeah, everywhere is basically within walking distance if you change the definition around enough.
I've actually spent a bit of time at towns near big labs, and for the most part these are not the kinds of big cities solving problems the article is trying to assert. They're sleepy little towns, many of which barely have a building over 2 stories. In fact, I live 20 minutes from a major biomed lab. I definitely do not live in a major city. 20 year ago people would have called this entire area "farms".
The article is positing that Cities, BIG Cities, are the places hard problems get solved. Not places withing an hour drive of a big city. CERN, ESRF, SLAC, etc. aren't in major cities of their respective countries. 150,000 people is not a big city. If the supposition was correct, it would make sense to set these kinds of hard problem solvers in your densest, most populated cities. NYC would be thick with labs, Paris, Tokyo and London would all be centers of major Research facilities.
I think the Soviets got it right with not being coy about what these places are: наукогра́д "science cities". For example, Tri-cities, WA is a "farm" town that only exists because one of the biggest U.S. nuke labs was built there. It was built there because it's out in the middle of nowhere. ORNL is a 2.5 hour drive from Nashville. Brookhaven, 1.5 hours.
My point is that cities don't solve hard problems. Cities merely bring efficiency that can be a useful tool in aiding this process. It'd be hard and more expensive to build something like the LHC without good infrastructure in place to move all the equipment in, so of course you're going to have good transit links and communications infrastructure etc. But the LHC wasn't built in downtown Paris was it?
[] (... and that Basic Science, High Energy Physics, Computational Science, Basic Tech, Corporate Research, and/or Public Policy/Economic/GeoPol research are the hard problem spaces you are alluding to...)
yeah basically. Let's be real honest here, the kinds of "problems" the Bay Area seems to spend most of it's time solving appear to be mostly figuring out how to extract the maximum amount of money out of fairly uninteresting technical implementations designed to let people chat and share cat pictures. In other words, money for engineering, not problem solving.
Anyway, what excites the author is the idea that this external cognitive process extends seamlessly into the internal cognitive process by way of the aforementioned findings about externalized knowledge. There is no real notion beyond that. He believes that as the city population grows larger and denser, the “genius” of the metaphorical city mind will increase; he cites strong evidence that this is true, but he attributes the solved logistics and communications of a large city to that genius, no matter that a mind is capable of no similar thing. If “people are to cities as neurons are to brains,” and based on the power-law scaling he mentions, he logically ought to end with the fear that all large cities will be eventually destroyed by massive epileptic cascades. Instead, he does the usual soft-shoe across different scales and concepts to freshen up an old and familiar imagination of science.
I have no idea why this is about San Francisco, although the golden gate bridge is quite obviously a corpus callosum.