Systems.

One of the most important revelations of my undergraduate career - one that I didn't really credit at the time, but which has stuck with me and deepened in my understanding - was my encounter with the writing of Louis Althusser. We read Althusser in my Literary Theory class (yes it's relevant) and during that kid-in-a-candy-shop time the force of certain ideas was much more important than their complex derivations and justifications. The particular notion of his that shook my sense of the world was that of the 'ideological state apparatus,' which roughly means [and this is all my fairly elementary gloss on the subject, so take the following with a grain of salt] 'institutional locus of ideological function or interpellation.' Or to take it down a necessary peg: an ISA is a site that serves to strengthen ideology, with or without any driving intention. Althusserian 'ideology' is a generalization of Marxian 'false consciousness,' which is the state of being enmeshed in the System and being unable to think your way out of it, to imagine a life after your economic circumstances. Kuhn would deal with a similar notion, the scientific paradigm, a century after Marx.

Ideology is what's in the air, but it's not fashion; it's a different order of false knowledge entirely. Indeed a certain ideology is a condition of possibility for fashion. And via very specific processes of acculturation, ideology comes to have dictated what we can even think of as 'false knowledge.' For me in my Lit Theory class, at age 21 just coming to terms with politics and religion and other Big Topics, the flying leap forward was that Althusser was talking semi-concretely about the institutions that reinforce ideology, and the mechanisms by which the individual is turned into a Subject of the State. Hell, maybe I liked hearing it because fashion seems so dumb.

Leave aside jarble like the 'always-already' terminology Marxist scholars and lit-crit types are fond of. Because this is a blog post about Systems.

Along with the Literary Theory class, during my senior year I took a graduate seminar in history called Marx, Darwin, Freud. You can guess what it was about. The instructor, Bruce Mazlish, proposed that the three titular thinkers were the most important intellectuals of their times or since. Darwin had what Dan Dennett calls the single greatest idea anyone's ever had, but within their domains, Marx and Freud had closely related ideas: so went the class's guiding principle. Similar structures, similar one-sentence takeaway: We're not driving. Understanding the world doesn't require the identification or even the existence of a 'prime mover' (God or anyone else); Systems perpetuate themselves. That's the heart of what's so unsettling about Darwin, so cold about Freud, so threatening about Marx. Each took the hands of Man off the reins of history and portrayed him as subject not to the whims of Great Men or some supernatural force, but to the simple logic of Systems: of equations, of production, of thought, of desire.

[Interpolation: Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman expand on older definitions of 'game' to provide their compelling but incomplete one: a game is a system for regulating player action and desire.]

Of course each of these three thinkers was also a product of his time, so in Darwin you get a very Christian struggle with the evidence for evolution; in Marx you have a Hegelian march to some absolute historical telos (oy vey); and in Freud you have the romantic notions of the Ego and the Id, the myth of the primal scene, the awfully literary Oedipus (Hamlet) complex, and so forth. But each thinker is dangerous - you might say 'hated' and not be far off the mark, though each is a hero within his field - because of what he takes away from our notions of our shared and individual selves.

Game studies held a lot of appeal for me because of its preoccupation with systems and systems thinking; in particular, my grad program focused heavily on a deeper grasp of systems dynamics as an overlooked but vital goal of primary and secondary education. (You can go through the same period of 'Holy shit!' reactions to these basic concepts in college, as I did, but imagine how far you could go learning about Darwin-the-speculative-systems-theorist in grade school, instead of Darwin-the-shipboard-adventurer-no-one-bothers-to-understand-or-actually-read...) Peter Senge's popular management series, the Fifth Discipline collection, stresses 'systems thinking' as a management style and key to strategy. What this means I've never been quite clear on - Senge's a Sloan School guy so I'm dubious about him from the start, and all I've read in the books struck me as management gobbledygook. But the point stands: once you get past the 'everything has to come from somewhere' dodge which is trivially true but not explanatory, a grasp of the systemic effects of atomic actions is one of the key insights of a modern liberal education.

[Interpolation: the motto of Frederic Jameson's The Political Unconscious is 'Always historicize!' I take this to be a specification of a general critical principle, which is 'Always systematize!' Though in this case you have to unpack that a little bit to avoid the dogmatic conflation of 'systematize' and 'schematize'. The latter is a tool but can lead to reductive escape. The former is a way of embracing the complexity and contingency of of judgments.]

Part of the appeal of a game like SimCity is that, to reuse a phrase I've been using for years but probably didn't think up, it pushes you toward the state of thinking like a system. To succeed at SimCity you've got to come up with a strategy (metrics) for evaluating the optimality of your zoning laws and water table and transportation scheme and social programs, based on limited knowledge; what makes a healthy city? The game gives you a partial answer but you fill in most of it yourself. Then you've got to probe the game system (engine) to determine the relationships of the many, many player-manipulable variables to the metrics you've chosen, and you've got to test the system in such a way that you don't induce catastrophic breakdown. (If I were feeling cheeky, I'd point out what good training it is for child-rearing.) And the game provides emotional hooks - 'personal' relationships with advisors and constituents, the ability to customize your city and give it a degree of identity - which have the dual effect of making you care about the game, while clouding your reasoning. In other words, what makes the game pleasurable is what makes it complex. SimCity is a triumph of game design, bringing the complexity of tabletop wargames (with their opaque 30-page small-print rulebooks and days-long playtime) into balance with the realtime excitement of the arcade. It's the best systems-thinking training tool available, I think.

At the same time, it goes beyond abstract principle to confront the nature of cities: their requirements change over time based on what individual agents (citizens, organizations, &c.) need. SimCity embraces an interesting notion of progress, namely that your city won't be truly successful until, as mayor, you've pushed it forward into a metropolis; it's hard to arrest the growth of your SimCity, when the game embodies certain principles about optimal placement of fire stations and so forth. I don't know much of anything about urban planning (though I'm happy to be able to point to Jane Jacobs and Christopher Alexander and go, 'I read those guys and I think I more or less understood'), so I can't criticize whether SimCity is right in its embedded principles about what cities are and are for.

I don't suspect you could do an analogous game about the work of political ideology; the processes by which superstitions and ideologies are inculcated into a populace are too essentially intricate to make it worthwhile to model them as video games. (That is to say: to make them computationally manageable I suspect you'd have to abstract them into unrecognizability or caricature; the latter would be worse, from a pedagogical standpoint.) The point of such a game would be to underscore the many-to-many nature of ideological operation, but even a game as rich as SimCity has to substitute one-to-one and one-to-many causal relations for the nuanced correlations of political spirituality (you might also call it 'spiritual politics'). Consider the phenomenon of 'white flight' and how you'd represent it in SimCity for instance...

We've gone far afield from my inchoate intention, but that's alright. I was set off thinking about these things by an article at the fantastic blog, Something Old, Nothing New, on sabermetrics and politics, and whether a sabermetrics of politics is possible. (He thinks yes. It's an interesting post.) I initially brought up Althusser not just to be a pedant, but to suggest that the kind of thinking we did in our Literary Theory class holds a lot of lessons for students of all kinds. While riding the T this morning I was reading The Origins of Life by John Maynard Smith and Eörs Szathmáry - a popular abridgement of their technical text, The Major Transitions in Evolution. I'm not far into the book yet, but the authors have already shed some light on their central concern, paradigmatic shifts in the nature of information-transmission between generations of organisms over the history of life on earth, and concomitant shifts in the complexity of information that can be transferred (e.g. the shift from simple replicating molecules to replicating systems capable of specifying higher-order structures - requiring the development of membranes to encapsulate these systems - enabled a transition from persistence to information as the 'purpose' of life; you might say this was the invention of the concept of abstraction, though I freely admit to taking interpretive license and punching way above my weight here). One hard thing about reading this text is that biological history is being written by the victors - namely us. ('We gonna get it together, right? I believe that.') We're just a branch of the evolutionary tree, and thinking of humanity as an interim 'solution' (or local equilibrium) to problems posed by the earth environment helps me avoid the narrativizing impulse common, I imagine, to a non-negligible number of humanities majors.

[Interpolation: images matter. The concept of 'local equilibrium' - a pool of stillness within the complex field of life on earth, within (in other words, but they're only words) the grand and groovy ecological matrix - means that directedness can be excised from this account of one's species's 'role' on earth. It's not about time moving forward and issuing requirements to the beasts of the field; it's about an entire dynamical system moving in an arbitrary direction through time. Mark that down as a big Note to Self. SimCity literalizes this way of thinking with its charts and graphs - the line graphs of relative wealth tell stories, but it's the water table graphic and zoning overlay you'll need to be thinking about all the time.]

The blogosphere, or its public face anyhow, was abuzz with talk of power laws a couple of years ago; Clay Shirky wrote a paper on the topic that's a pretty good introduction to the very basic math and complicated implications of power laws, even if like every other paper on the topic (and there's a million of 'em) it's a lot more 'gosh! wow!' than scholarly. Very Gladwellian in style. (I'm a neologist! A neographer!) The basic insight is the same one every humanistic scholar of the 20th Century has been dealing with in one form or another: systems produce effects that look intentional, but it's the nature of the systems themselves, their complex internal dynamics and relationships to outside forces, that we need to understand most of all. Shirky is of (mild) interest because he's interested in how you can build technological tools to manage complexity in social systems; if his answers are at times a little bit pop-psych, we can chalk that up to a desire for simplicity, which is a good guiding principle. Plus he's smart (and has written about Nomic, even if he's never played the game and says some dumb things about it).

The 'power laws! power laws!' narrative makes it easy to duck out of the less fashionable (read: less Math 101) aspects of Internet 'A-list' inequality/unfairness, which danah boyd among others has ably chronicled. Blogggers are themselves something of an A-list, in their millions, and carping about Kottke and Instapundit's traffic without talking about the very particular nature of their audiences is the kind of bourgeois 'intellectual' masturbation unworthy of the time it takes, except as an abstract exercise. (Then again, just complaining about their audiences doesn't get you anywhere either.) I should think that technological interventions intended to break up the inequality of systemic outcomes (e.g. the existence of a blogging 'A-list', or the fact that 80% of the wealth in an industrialized country invariably ends up in the hands of 20% of the people, more or less) need to be targeted toward the constituents of that (political, religious, social, communicative, biological) system in ways that a purely systemic description wouldn't suggest; on the other hand, Malcolm Gladwell's recent article about 'power laws social policy' seems to suggest otherwise. In Gladwell's tentative formulation, maybe you can make a good start at solving social problems by addressing them in an essentially statistical way, e.g. by taking the worst 20% of drunks off the street and simply giving them apartments, or objectively (i.e. not subject to review and such) taxing the 20% of worst automobile emissions offenders.

One difference between the approach Gladwell's describing and my suspicion: the question of whether the pop-sci description of a problem is enough to generate a solution. I'm too far afield at this point - I can't answer the question, didn't intend to, and am not even certain how I came to be asking it. Hooray for blogs.

[Interpolation: I chose the categories under which this post was to be listed before I wrote it. It's a weird strategy, in that it's forcing me to bend the writing a bit to match my original intention. So now I'm fighting with myself about whether I really meant to mean what I said I was going to say. I'm going to do a hard reset, now, and just drop some sentences out of the blue, and then maybe have an earlyish lunch.]

The confluence of (crazy) religious belief and (crazy) politics isn't a simple one; at issue are the many kinds of satisfaction that those two games offer, the two realms of desire they address. I think structural analogies between systems of political and religious belief can work as fruitful areas for study and debate. When you get down to shapes of beliefs and the shapes of the institutions that enforce them, I imagine you can start visualizing relationships of this kind in interesting ways. That's the analytic side. On the aesthetic side, for God's sake someone please make several dozen clones of Marc Downie, the smartest person I've ever met and one of the most interesting and talented artists and designers I know of. (I was his UROP for a summer at the Media Lab; it was a great opportunity, and I learned a lot more directly from him than I've realized. He is the future, people.) Religion isn't simply a set of postulates which people latch onto or don't, abetted by satellite institutions; it's a system of belief and action, which seeks to regulate the adherent's actions and desires -

- you might say its pleasures are familiar ones, come to think of it -

[Interpolation: it's generally thought of as a discredit to call something 'only a game,' but play is a learning and growth process. Whether God is or isn't, we play at being believers. The (literally) deadly seriousness of religious belief (desire) and action is the real discredit: it strips the germinative, imaginative power from faith, which is too often presented as an endpoint or ultimate justification. Faith is not an escape.]

- and I think it's time for lunch. Or breakfast in any case.