Delight in disorder

Now that the Web has made everything miscellaneous, as David Weinberger argues in his new book, we're free to remix the world.

By Scott Rosenberg

Read more: Books, Scott Rosenberg, Interviews, World Wide Web, Authors, Books Interviews

May 23, 2007 | The rise of the Web has dethroned authorities, atomized our culture and set us loose in the resulting sea of fragments. This familiar sky-is-falling argument regularly inspires an anguished plea: We must restore order in the messy digital realm! Won't someone organize this endless churning chaos? Can't we clean up the Web?

David Weinberger says, nah. For one thing, such an effort would be futile. More important, it misses a great opportunity technology has opened before us -- a chance to transform how we think about, well, everything.

Weinberger's new book, "Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder," lays out the upside of digital technology's impact on our ways of knowing. The book builds on ideas in Weinberger's previous works -- "Small Pieces Loosely Joined" and "The Cluetrain Manifesto" (which he co-authored) -- to present a key insight into the nature of the Web world.

The argument goes like this: As long as knowledge was organized physically, on paper, in books and card catalogs and such, we remained stuck in the belief that there is "one right way" to define, organize and think about any subject. Now we've moved information into the infinitely mutable realm of digital data -- where anything can point to anything else, space keeps expanding faster than we can fill it, and we can reshuffle and re-sort at a keystroke.

In this world, the same thing can "be" in more than one place -- it can, in fact, be in as many places as we want. That means we have a chance to think more nimbly and flexibly -- to reorganize knowledge from multiple perspectives to suit our changing needs. We're not losing context; we're gaining contexts.

"Everything Is Miscellaneous" offers a hopeful, pragmatic vision of how the benefits of moving from paper to bits will outweigh the costs. It's also an approachable work of popular philosophy in business-book drag. It covers timely topics like Wikipedia and tagging and folksonomies; it also offers diverting takes on the Dewey Decimal System, Linnaeus' species classification, the periodic table of the elements, and the controversy over Pluto's membership in the club of planets.

I recently talked with Weinberger at Salon's San Francisco office.

"Everything Is Miscellaneous" talks about three different "orders of orders." It's very orderly, in that way. But by the time I reached the end I'd forgotten what the first two orders were.

The first order is the organization of the things themselves: the books on the bookshelves, the radishes in the ground -- physical things arranged physically. It doesn't get much more basic and primitive than that. Second order is the information about those things, the metadata -- physically separated from it, and also organized physically. Typically, that data is a great reduction of the information in the first order: catalog cards that take a book full of ideas and complexity and boil it down to what fits on a 3-by-5 card. We do that because of physical limitations.

What you actually want is not just all of the information that's in the book, but more than that, you want all the information about the book. You want to know everybody who talked about it. You can't do that in the second order -- the card catalog would be bigger than the library. We've grown to accept that we need to reduce the amount of information in order to make things findable.

Is that because we're locked into the assumption that the physical order is the only order?

Yes, and it has been the best way of doing it. You have to make very good decisions about which information to capture, and we've gotten good at those decisions.

In the third order, the contents and the metadata are digital. Because the digital space is unbounded, it's indefinite, it's so cheap to add stuff, we can actually get what we wanted in the second order, but we didn't know we wanted -- which is to have a superset of information on the first order as a way of finding it.

One of the frequent reactions to "Everything Is Miscellaneous" is what you might call "the second-order people strike back" -- the argument that we need experts and authorities and the order they impose on chaos.

People say, we really still need the expertise and the second-order systems transposed into the digital realm -- these are very well thought through taxonomies and taxonomic trees that you can browse through, and they have advantages that you don't get in messy, Webby systems. And unfortunately for the purposes of controversy, I agree with that! You want to have everything. There are places where you need the precision of a taxonomic tree -- you need defined terms, you need very carefully constructed metadata that is a reduction of the full set of information in order to find things. We want that. We just want everything else, too.

So you're not saying, "Away with you, taxonomy experts -- we have no further need for you!" But you are saying to them, and I assume this is where the squawks kick in, your place of privilege is not what it used to be, and you need to step off the pedestal now and get into the pool with everyone else.

Compete on the merits. Yes.

You write about how we no longer need to resolve the old "Odd Couple" war between Felix neatniks and Oscar slobs. But you do seem to have a soft spot for "disorder." I spent a certain amount of time playing Dungeons and Dragons in my youth -- perhaps you as well?

I was nerdy in many ways, but not that way.

In D&D you'd have to choose not one but two "alignments" for your character -- good and evil, of course, but also "law" and "chaos." And among the people I ran with, at least, "chaotic/good," that was the thing to be, because it let you trust other people and still have fun. At some point in reading "Everything Is Miscellaneous" it occurred to me that the book is a great celebration of the chaotic/good alignment.

Exactly what I had in mind! As with everything else, there are some people who are more rules-based, and some people who are more trickster-like. You run across this all the time on the Web. You're on a discussion list. There are people who want to be digressive, and people who want to stay on topic.

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