History as written by a "SimCity" freak

When you were writing that epilogue, Iran was the bubbling crisis you mentioned.

I know -- it's like, you can't keep up! That's clearly to me the nightmare scenario. If you did have a few detonations in large metropolitan areas, it would radically change the cost-benefit analysis of people living in cities all over the world. My wife and I are incredibly committed to raising our kids in a dense multicultural urban environment, and 9/11 hit pretty close to home for us. We thought about leaving, just with 3,000 dead. So if a million die, I think we move. And if I'm moving, a lot of other people are moving -- because part of my whole professional career has been about celebrating that kind of lifestyle.

Your optimism in "Ghost Map" is based on our species' ability to interpret patterns of evidence intelligently. That made me think of 9/11 -- where we had a lot of evidence, but it was obscured, in pieces, or ignored. So maybe we're still not doing a very good job of reading evidence in lots of areas -- social structures, political organizations.

I would completely agree with that. In the case of 9/11, issue one is, large distributed organizations, particularly ones with antiquated computers and bureaucracies, traditionally have a hard time detecting patterns. And the other thing is that the data is all closed.

Another crucial element in "The Ghost Map" is that William Farr started publishing weekly bills of mortality organized by disease. And made them publicly available. If that had been closed knowledge, if only public health authorities were allowed to see these charts, they'd have lost the key data on who was dying and why, because they were stuck on the wrong idea. But there was a "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" kind of philosophy -- a notion of "Let's get it out there, and maybe it'll be useful to somebody." Every week the report would come out. Snow would say, ah, yes, numbers, data! And an amateur was looking at it, and had this insight, and was able to do something with it.

Obviously there is a reason why the FBI doesn't post online every single tip it gets. But pattern detection just works better the more folks who have access to the data and who have new ways of representing the data. So on the one hand there's a great explosion in that, in the online world and the Web. Think of the multiple ways we have of mapping the blogosphere -- it's just incredible. Things that you and I were dreaming of 10 years ago, and now 35 companies are working on new ways to map all these conversations.

But as far as we know, that's not going on inside these intelligence organizations. I know it's what they want to be doing. That's what Poindexter was trying to do -- people got all over him, but it was not a preposterous idea, the open futures market. It was an attempt to figure out a way to use the wisdom of crowds.

So are there miasma theories out there today? Or is that impossible to answer, because we just can't see them?

Every age has these blind spots. Normally they have multiple ones. So you have to assume that your age does too. Part of what you're supposed to do as an educated intelligent person is try and figure out the giant weird invisible elephant in the room that nobody's talking about -- the thing that everybody's missing. But it's hard. They're blind spots for a reason.

Tell me about your new Web project, outside.in.

It's a really fun thing for me, which has happened a couple of times in the past, where the ideas I've been working on intellectually in a book have trickled over into a software or Web project. The idea animating it is, there's this amazing, beautiful wave of local amateurs -- Henry Whiteheads, John Snows -- out there today. They're writing about their neighborhoods, sharing all this information, writing about all that passionately important stuff that makes up the day-to-day existence of people's lives right outside the zone of the family: the school down the street they're worried about, the park that maybe's going to open or not, the new restaurant that may be there.

These things haven't traditionally had a form of media for them. And suddenly, thanks to the blogs, and sites like Yelp and Backfence or Judy's Book, they have this amplification. Then of course traditional media is writing about local issues, too. Your restaurant down the street's being reviewed by your local paper. But the problem is, it all exists off in these different compartments.

We decided to take all those pieces of information and set up a very easy system for tagging them geographically. Often when people are thinking about local information they don't want to know exactly where this is on a map. They're thinking, I just want to know what's around me at this particular point in space. The cool thing is that it gives you this "what's happening now at this point in space" dashboard and you can zoom in and zoom out. But it also leaves behind a trail of information that continues to be relevant.

It took shockingly little money to get it started. And we're gonna see what happens. It's in that nice zone where you can see a real business there -- local advertising and zip-code-based national advertising is huge. On the other hand, it's one of the great passions of my life to figure out ways to get city neighborhoods to work better and to communicate better.

It reminds me of when I was writing "Emergence" and I was doing Plastic. And the two were so tied up in each other. In some ways "Interface Culture" and Feed were like that in the same way. So this is the third time I've had a book and a software project that have been aligned with each other. It's been fun.

Story finder (3 ways to search Salon)

Search terms:

Salon the Web

Salon Directory (browse by topic)