The emergent new order

Feed magazine founder Steven Johnson explains how self-organizing systems are made to order for ants, cities, software and terrorists.

By Andrew Leonard

Nov. 28, 2001 | As one of the pioneers of Web publishing, Steven Johnson, co-founder of Feed, went a long way toward proving that the Internet could be a home for intelligent, thought-provoking commentary. Feed, alas, is no more, a victim of the current media recession, but Johnson is very much with us, currently in action juggling the weighty responsibilities of both a new son and a new book: "Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software."

Johnson's first book, 1997's "Interface Culture," proposed the ambitious argument that the human-computer interface might be "the art form of the 21st century." "Emergence" aims at even headier game: Johnson combines elements of complexity and chaos theory to look at how decentralized, adaptive, self-organizing systems flourish in the world today.

If that sounds like a mouthful, that's because it is -- but Johnson's elegant, crystal-clear narrative style excises jargon in favor of lucid examples drawn from such seemingly disparate worlds as anthills and urban metropolises. And if it also sounds like ground that has been covered before, notably in Kevin Kelly's 1995 epic "Out of Control," that's true too. But Johnson takes Kelly one huge step further by showing how key concepts of complexity theory intersect with the world made possible by the Internet.

Johnson has been making the book-tour rounds over the past few months, a task made doubly challenging by his new baby and the question of relevance in the post Sept. 11 era. For many longtime observers of Internet and computer culture, it's been difficult to focus on old obsessions while beset on all sides by the realities of war, terrorism and recession. But the likely staying power of "Emergence" is suggested by this: It's all too easy to fit al-Qaida's worldwide network of holy warriors into Johnson's paradigm. The subtitle of "Emergence" could easily be "The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, Software, and Jihad."

Johnson managed to take some time off from tending the needs of his new family to speak with Salon about "Emergence."

What is the connection between ants, cities, brains and software?

The connection is really that they are all self-organizing decentralized systems that involve a whole host of distributed elements that somehow collectively manage to solve higher-level problems.

The best example is the ant colony that the prologue of the book starts with, where you have this system of 10,000 ants, none of which are actually in charge but somehow they manage to do these very complex engineering tasks and social organization and resource management things that are mesmerizing feats. They look like they should be planned from above, but in fact they are entirely organized by local rules and local interactions. The catchphrase is that the whole is sometimes smarter than the sum of its parts. And when you look at something like an ant colony, the question that you ask is who makes this happen? Who makes this collective intelligence happen? And the answer is everybody and nobody at the same time.

You can take that and look at something like the formation of city neighborhoods. In a traditional organic evolving city, who decided that my neighborhood in downtown Manhattan in the West Village has been for about 120 years a kind of artists', eclectic, writerly place to live? Well, everybody and nobody; it's this kind of collective decision that happens. It's a cluster that forms out of lots of local decisions and has a kind of persistence over time.

Next page: How New York survived Sept. 11 -- as a decentralized, self-organizing system