The Art of Refactored Perception
When you approach all reality with an intrinsic lawyer mind, you fundamentally believe that no matter how powerful your perspective-shifting abilities, you cannot adopt all relevant points of view. Not even all human points of view. With a judge-mind by contrast, your starting assumption is that you will eventually be able to appreciate all points of view in play. It is a somewhat arrogantly visionary perspective in that sense, and requires exhibition of a sufficient imagination to justify itself.
The hyperlink is the most elemental of the bundle of ideas that we call the Web. If the bit is the quark of information, the hyperlink is the hydrogen molecule. It shapes the microstructure of information today. Surprisingly though, it is nearly as mysterious now as it was back in July 1945, when Vannevar Bush first proposed the idea in his Atlantic Monthly article, As We May Think.
The reason this scares some people is rather Freudian: when an author hyperlinks, s/he instantly transforms the author-reader relationship from parent-child to adult-adult. You must decide how to read. Your mom does not live on the Web.
In short, we do not expect musical or visual arts to be unfragmented or “smooth” or allow us to forget context. We can tolerate extreme closeness to random noise in other media. Most art does not demand that our experience of it be “ludic” the way writing does. Our experience can be disconnected, arm’s-length and self-conscious, and still constitute a legitimate reading. Word-art though, has somehow been trapped within its own boundaries, defined by a limited idea of comprehensibility and an aesthetic of intimacy and smooth flow.
There are two reasons for this. First, sounds and images are natural, and since our brains can process purely unscripted stuff of natural origin, there is always an inescapable broader sensory context within which work must be situated. The color of the wall matters to the painting in a way that the chair does not matter to the reading of a book. Words are unnatural things, and have always lived in isolated, bound bundles within which they create their own natural logic. The second reason: music and visual art can be more easily created collaboratively and rely on the diversity of minds to achieve greater levels of dissonance (an actor and director for example, both contribute to the experience of the movie). Writing has historically been a lonely act since the invention of Gutenberg’s press. We are now returning to a world of writing that is collaborative, the way it was before Gutenberg.
Or you could think of browsing as a new kind of ludic: an unsettling, fragmented experience that is still comprehensible in the sense that a David Lynch movie is comprehensible. It is a kind of ludic that can never be created within one brain. Click trails are texts whose coherence derives from your mind, but whose elements derive from multiple other minds.
If you start with McLuhan, as most people do, there are two ways to view the Web: as a vast meta-medium, or as a regular McLuhanesque medium, with nothing meta about it. For a long-time I adopted the meta-medium view (after all, the Web can play host to every other form: text, images, video and audio), but I am convinced now that the other view is equally legitimate, and perhaps more important. The Web is a regular medium whose language is the hyperlink. The varieties of hyperlinking constitute the vocabulary of the Web. If I give you an isolated URL to type into your browser, for a stand-alone web page with a video or a piece of text, you are not really on the Web. If there is no clickable hyperlink involved, you are just using the browser as a novel reading device.
We talk of dense texts as being layered. They lend themselves to re-reading from many perspectives over a long period of time. Even as late as the nineteenth century, we find that the average professional writer wrote with a density that rivals the densest writing today. With the exception of scientific writing — best understood as a social-industrial process for increasing the density of words — every other kind of writing today has become less layered. Most writing admits one reading, if that.
For the ancients, texts had to be little metered packets. But as paper technology got cheaper and more reliable, poetry, like many other obsolete technologies before and after, turned into an art form. Critical function turned into dispensable style. Meter and rhyme ceased to be useful as error-correcting coding mechanisms and turned into free dimensions for artistic expression.
Poetry gets it right: length is irrelevant. You can standardize and normalize it away using appropriate containerization. It is density that matters. Evolving your packet size and vocabulary over time helps you increase density over time.
Poetry—functional ancient poetry, the cultural TCP/IP of the world before around 1000 AD—is necessarily a social process, involving, at the very least, a sage-bard, a scribe, an audience and a patron. The oral culture refines, distills, tests, reworks, debates and judges. Iterative performance is a necessary component. When oral exegesis of an unstable verse dies down, and memorization and repetition validate the quality of the finished verse, the scribe breaks out his chisel.
History does not rewind. It synthesizes. The blogosphere, I am convinced, synthesizes the collectivist pre-Gutenberg culture of sage-bard and scribes with the individualist post-Gutenberg culture of paper-crumpling waste-paper-basket fillers.
Dense writing creates illegible slums of meaning. To the vocational writer, it looks discursive, messy and randomly exploratory. But what the vocational writer mistakes for a lack of clear intention is actually a multiplicity of intentions, both conscious and unconscious.
In the days of 64k memories, programmers wrote code with as much care as ancient scribes carved out verses on precious pieces of rock, one expensive chisel-pounding rep at a time. In the remarkably short space of 50 years, programming has evolved from rock-carving parsimony to paper-wasting profligacy.
But why shouldn’t you waste bits or paper when you can, in service of clarity and accessibility? Why layer meaning upon meaning until you get to near-impenetrable opacity? I think it is because the process of compression is actually the process of validation and comprehension. When you ask repeatedly, who is listening, every answer generates a new set of conflicts. The more you resolve those conflicts before hitting Publish, the denser the writing. If you judge the release density right, you will produce a very generative piece of text that catalyzes further exploration rather than ugly flame wars.
I’ve been experimenting lately with aphorisms. Pithy one-liners of the sort favored by writers like La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680). My goal was to turn a relatively big idea, the sort I would normally turn into a 4000-word post, into a one-liner. After many failed attempts over the last few months, a few weeks ago, I finally managed to craft one I was happy with: Civilization is the process of turning the incomprehensible into the arbitrary.
I used to think that the terseness of written language through most of history was mostly a result of the high cost and low reliability of writing technologies in pre-modern times. I now think these were secondary issues.
Literacy used to be a very subtle concept that meant linguistic sophistication. It used to denote a skill that could be developed to arbitrary levels of refinement through practice. Literacy meant using mastery over language — both form and content — to sustain a relentless and increasingly sophisticated pursuit of greater meaning.
So the terseness of an enduring maxim is as much about cross-cultural generality as it is about compactness.
The right kind of terseness allows you to accomplish a difficult transmission challenge: transmission across cultures and mental models. Reading and writing by contrast, merely accomplish transmission across time and space. They are much simpler inventions than exposition and condensation.
Before Gutenberg, reading and writing were considered not just secondary skills, but lowly ones, much as typing in the days before personal computing. It is revealing that the first designs for a personal computer at Xerox included one that had no keyboard next to the monitor, but was equipped instead with a dictaphone connection to a secretary who did any typing necessary. It was assumed that executives would not want to do their own typing, but would watch the action scroll by on a monitor.
The traditional explanation for the mysterious persistence of oral cultures has been that pre-Gutenberg written-word technologies were either too expensive to be generally accessible, or simply not reliable enough. The characteristic practices of oral cultures, by this theory, evolved to aid accurate preservation through memorization.
This was a radical realization for me: oral culture is not about preservation-by-memorization.
Prodigious energy was expended by ancient Indian culture in ensuring that these texts were transmitted from generation to generation with inordinate fidelity. For example, memorization of the sacred Vedas included up to eleven forms of recitation of the same text.
If you are practicing eleven different forms of combinatorial recitation, there is clearly something going on beyond preservation-by-memorization. One piece of evidence is that though the Vedas were accurately preserved, the oral culture also sustained torrents of secondary expository literature that was not accurately preserved.
Once you try this out loud, you realize what is happening. This is microcosmic creative destruction. Try to do this sort of recitation really mindlessly. You will find it extraordinarily difficult. The recitation patterns will force you to pay attention to meaning as well. Far from being about mindless rote memorization, recitation is about mindful attention to a text.
For many students, practicing recitation must have been mindless tedium, but for a few, it would have catalyzed active consideration and reworking of the underlying ideas, in search of new wisdom. These students must have evolved into new masters, the source of beneficial mutations and crossovers in the cultural memeplexes they were charged with preserving.
Being forced to juggle words like this must have helped cultivate a clear awareness of the distinction between form and content. It must have helped cultivate an appreciation of language as a medium for performance rather than a medium for transmission or preservation. It must have forced students to pay careful attention to precision of word choice in their own compositions. It must have sustained a very mindful linguistic culture.
The only way the original can survive such mangling is if it is actually a beautifully dense condensation that has a certain robust memetic stability. At the risk of losing most of you, I think of a carefully composed set of related aphorisms as eigenvectors spanning a space of meaning. It is the space itself, and the competence to explore it, that define a literate comprehension of the text. Not the ability to reproduce or translate between written and oral forms.
And then Gutenberg happened. The results were not immediately apparent. The old culture of literacy persisted for several centuries. The tipping point came in the 1890s, when printing technology became sufficiently cheap to support mass media (there is a world of difference between ubiquity of bibles and a culture of daily newspapers).
Gutenberg certainly created a huge positive change. It made the raw materials of literary culture widely accessible. It did not, however, make the basic skills of literacy, exposition and condensation, more ubiquitous.
By contrast, modern mass culture is a spectator culture, linguistically speaking. You read stories but you do not necessarily attempt to rewrite them. You watch movies, but you do not attempt to re-enact them as plays that incorporate elements of local culture. The analogy to music is again useful. Before the gramaphone and radio, most families around the world made their own music.
The effects of print, radio and television based mass media were to basically destroy popular literary (but not necessarily written) cultures everywhere. Was it an accident or an act of deliberate cultural violence? I believe it was an accident that proved so helpful for the industrial world that repairs were never made, like smallpox decimating the ranks of Native Americans.
As the finely differentiated universe of local folk cultures was gradually replaced by a handful of mass, popular cultures, ordinary citizens lost their locally enacted linguistic cultures, and began to feed passively on mass-produced words. In the process, they also lost the basic skills of literacy: exposition and condensation, and partially regressed to pre-Neolithic levels of linguistic sophistication, where language sustains social interaction and communication, but not critical, abstract thought.
Words and phrases turn into mechanical incantations that evoke predictable responses from similarly educated minds. Yes there is meaning here, but it is not precise meaning in the sense of a true literary culture. Instead it is a vague fog of sentiment and intention that shrouds every spoken word. It is more expressive than the vocalizations of some of our animal cousins, but not by much.
When I am in a public space dominated by mass culture and its native inhabitants, such as a mall, I feel like I am surrounded by philosophical zombies. Yes, they talk and listen, but it is not clear to me that what they are using is language. And it isn’t just the I’m like, duh, and she’s like uh-oh crowd that I am talking about. I am including here the swarms of barely-literate (in the thinking sense) liberal arts graduates who can read and write phrases like always-already and dead-white-male (why not already-always or deceased-European man? I suspect Derrida and Foucault could tell you, but none of the millions who parrot them could).
This might sound like engineering elitism, but I find that the only large classes of people who appear to actually think in clearly literate ways today are mathematicians and programmers. But they typically only do so in very narrow domains.
To learn to think with language, to become literate in the sense of linguistically sophisticated, you must work hard to unlearn everything built on the foundation of literacy-as-reading-and-writing.
We dimly realize that we have lost something. But appreciation for the sophistication of oral cultures mostly manifests itself as mindless reverence for traditional wisdom. We look back at the works of ancients and deep down, wonder if humans have gotten fundamentally stupider over the centuries. We haven’t. We’ve just had some crucial meme-processing software removed from our brains.
But try reading some La Rochefoucauld, or even late hold outs like Oliver Wendell Holmes and J. B. S. Haldane, and you begin to understand what literacy is really about. The cost of words is not the cost of storing them or distributing, but the cost of producing them. Words are cheap today because we put little effort into their production, not because we can store and transmit as much as we like.
Before Gutenberg, you demonstrated true literacy not by reading a text out aloud and taking down dictation accurately, but through exposition and condensation.