Delight in disorder

I clearly have taken sides in the book -- I like what's going on. But there's also a sense in which I'm simply attempting to describe what's going on. I'm not saying, wouldn't it be great if everything were miscellaneous, though I do think there are big advantages; I'm saying, I think that's a way of describing what's happening, with a certain inevitability. Content that had been locked up in careful structures and connected with other pieces and arranged and organized, and that has real value, that stuff is getting unlocked. And now we have this massive amount of stuff that we need to pull together in various ways.

Your reaction to that may be glee, may be fear. There is an element of personality in it; there's also an element of power. That is, if you are in a business that depends on maintaining tight control over the structure of information, then you probably don't much like what's going on.

You cite the BBC as one example of a business that's trying to figure out how to make the best of the new world, but of course it's a nonprofit public institution. You talk about media companies finding ways to "bring their assets new value." But the traditional information or media company looks out and says, "Hey, there's old value here that's being threatened, how do we build the stockades?" Your stance seems to be, change is inevitable -- adapt or die.

If you are a content company, I don't know what's going to happen. There are absolute imponderables, like, in the U.S., what will the Congress do? What will the courts do? And what will technology do? We just can't know what will happen. We can certainly see that there is a strong trend, a strong impulse to take content that's under lock and key and to make it widely available. You just have to look at music -- it's incontestable. Insofar as stuff is available, how are we going to reassemble the pieces? Which we can now do without having to own the pieces. We can reassemble the pieces by pointing at them -- a playlist, basically, as the structure.

You've described your book as an "argument with Aristotle." Here you are, it's a book about "the new digital disorder," and we're arguing with the ancients. How did that happen?

Our culture's been arguing with him for a long time. The argument is, whether there is a right order of the universe -- one right order. Aristotle didn't come up with the idea, but he was the person who articulated it so forcefully that for 2,000 years he was simply believed. This is an order in which everything has a place, and to know what something is is to know that place, and in knowing it you're seeing what makes it what it is. That's why it can't be in two places on the chart, on the diagram -- because then it's two things, and that's chaos.

You also need to know within a category, things are different from the other things in that category -- this is the genus/species idea. It's a deep and fascinating notion -- that to be something is to both be like something else and be unlike it. And it works really well -- it allows you to construct a universe. And it allows you to keep some things implicit. We know this is a bird without also having to think, oh, bird, that's a type of animal, oh, and animal therefore is a type of thing, and things all have these properties. That's one of the mysteries of knowing -- that we don't know everything simultaneously all the time.

So we have this definition, and it's clear and it's precise. The entire system is beautiful and balanced and harmonious. And this is the vision that we carried with us for a long, long time. But we've been shaking it off for generations now -- it's not like, the Web came along and suddenly we were free of Aristotle. Multiculturalism, relativism, postmodernism -- all these things are disputing the notion of a single order. The Web just slaps us in the face with the fact that there's lots and lots of ways of slicing up the world.

But how we slice it up, how we cluster it, how things connect, depends on what we're trying to do. It's an amazing tool for consciousness to have, to be able to see the world according to the relevant attributes based upon a project -- that's what lets us survive, and do more. But that places the clustering of the universe, to some large degree, on our interests and our cares. Which is, from the Aristotelian point of view, to put it in the realm of whim and madness.

This is also why it seems to me so important that we're doing this socially. One of the mistakes that we've made in our history is to think that if there isn't a single order that's right, then it's up to every person to make it up for herself. And that's what we call madness.

Anything goes -- everybody puts things together any way they want.

That doesn't accord with how we live. The fact that so much of the clustering we're doing online, the techniques we're evolving online for pulling together the pieces of information that we need, are social, are based upon recommendations made by social groups, that we learn from others, is one of the things that takes away from the madness that otherwise might ensue.

The other thing it does is that we so clearly can be wrong. That's the other constraint on everything goes. A pair of pliers doesn't belong in a fruit basket. There are right and wrong ways of clustering. But there are so many, an indefinite number of ways of clustering because of the infinite number of attributes, that it is up to us to decide what matters to us.

In the case of Pluto, there was a golden opportunity for scientists to instruct us. There is no definition of a planet. We just don't have one. Something that wanders against the sky was fine for the Greeks, when they're gazing up and they saw irregular motion. But now we're looking at the solar system, we see stuff that's so far away. And there's a lot of stuff circling the sun. What makes a planet?

So the International Astronomical Union meets last summer to settle this issue. And they come up with a definition for planets which is based upon properties that are not themselves interesting properties, but do give us back eight out of the nine planets, and that's why they chose those properties.

Next page: A missed opportunity for scientists to redefine the planets