Steven Johnson: Innovation & Anarchism

photo credit: Phil Hawksworth

There’s a seriously nifty interview with science writer Steven Johnson in today’s Guardian. Not sure how I feel about his occasional echoes of the technology tree from Sid Meier’s Civilization, but the notion of an ‘adjacent possible’ is really rather wonderful. Some choice extracts:

‘to 1950s viewers, Johnson argues, complex TV shows such as Lost or The Wire would have been borderline incomprehensible, like some kind of avant-garde art, because certain ways of engaging with the medium hadn’t yet been learned.’

The co-evolution of technology and cultural form was one of the precepts of my Goldsmiths MA. So the level of personal resonance should be of no great surprise…

‘the best way to encourage (or to have) new ideas isn’t to fetishise the “spark of genius”, to retreat to a mountain cabin in order to “be creative”, or to blabber interminably about “blue-sky”, “out-of-the-box” thinking. Rather, it’s to expand the range of your possible next moves – the perimeter of your potential – by exposing yourself to as much serendipity, as much argument and conversation, as many rival and related ideas as possible; to borrow, to repurpose, to recombine. This is one way of explaining the creativity generated by cities, by Europe’s 17th-century coffee-houses, and by the internet.’

In other words, “maximise your exposure to randomness.”

See also: The real reason for Germany’s industrial expansion.

‘… Johnson demonstrates that the vast majority of major innovations since 1800 have come from outside the free market – from universities and other environments where profit wasn’t the overwhelming motivation. The urge to hoard, protect and directly profit from good ideas can work against the sharing-and-recombining ethos that the adjacent possible demands.’

Not the market … but not the state, either? Hmm.

Sure sounds familiar.

‘Politically speaking, none of this is rightwing in any traditional sense: it’s a rejection of America’s cherished belief in the primacy of individualism and free markets. But the focus on grassroots connectedness isn’t really left-wing, either, “if leftwing means you’re enamoured of large state interventions in society”. A philosophy of innovation that rejected both of those “might be called anarchism”, Johnson says, then looks slightly surprised at himself. “Huh. I’m not sure I’d want to be associated with that word, though.”‘

– Oliver Burkeman, ‘Steven Johnson: ‘Eureka moments are very, very rare’, The Guardian