Freelance Web Design & Development

I used to spend a lot of time thinking about whether my activities were “pointful”. As a teenager, I’d obsessively analyze all the work I was doing and judge it by whether it had any measurable, real-world effect — “this shift at the bookstore was pointless because there were two of us and business was slow enough for one of us to handle”, or “my role as a stagehand is pointful because no one else in the show is available to turn on this light at this time”. I’d abandon “pointless” activities in favor of tasks where my presence made a quantifiable difference to some observable outcome.

As you might expect, this could get pretty depressing at times! Now that I’ve reached the ripe age of 23 (and, of course, now understand everything), I have a different perspective. I went canvassing to get out the vote in New Hampshire on Election Day — was this “pointful” by my old standards? Absolutely not! Every voter I talked to had already voted by the time I got to them — and even if I had been able to remind someone to go to the polls, it would hardly have made a difference, from my teenage perspective, to Obama’s tens-of-thousands-of-votes lead. Similarly, I gladly and proudly voted myself — but everything I voted for in Massachusetts was much closer to a 60/30 margin than a 50/50 one. My teenage self might have asked, why would I think it was so cool to participate in these things if it was so obviously pointless?

I used to focus on myself as an individual actor, but my appreciation has deepened for my role in emergent systems. My individual actions in getting out the vote and voting didn’t “make a difference”, but I was one of many cells making up larger systems (the campaign’s organization of volunteers, the electorate) that clearly did affect the outcome of the election — just like individual neurons in my brain die all the time without affecting my thoughts, but neurons certainly aren’t “pointless”, since all of them together collectively make up the larger system of my brain!

I was thinking about this because I’m reading I Am A Strange Loop, which explores some of these issues of emergent properties; it’s by the author of the extremely excellent (but long!) Gödel, Escher, Bach, which is also interested in these questions. For a breezier introduction, check out Steven Johnson’s take.

Also, I’m excited to be reading something new after taking almost six months to read Gravity’s Rainbow. Talk about intense! GR is also, in some sense, about the relationship between actors and larger systems. But it’s not about systems that emerge naturally from the combination of less complex elements — it’s a massive paranoid fantasy, full of ambiguity about what levels of the systems have agency, whether they’re constructed top-down or bottom-up, or whether they even exist!

Regular old emergent systems are much simpler.