Unpredictable Patterns #35: Opportunity in the gaps between categories
Things, acts, wholes, parts, time and why you should challenge your nouns
Dear reader,
Summer tethers on the brink of autumn, and I suspect this coming week we will formally be transitioning softly into a new season. I always liked autumn and am looking forward to it - I just need to stock up on firewood and books, and tea, and we will be off to a glorious few months. Autumn is always shorter than you think - you have three months to get things done and then the long (and wonderful) shadow of Christmas/The Holidays starts to change moods and minds in interesting ways. But not yet! Lots of things to do…and so let’s talk about how we can start spotting opportunities in the gap between categories!
Categorical thinking
We can only think the world in categories, and in categorizing something we try to bring it under our control (one of the original meanings of the word that forms the stem of category is to accuse - we use our categories to accuse the world!). The categories we use determine the search space for solutions, ideas, creative thought and dreams - and so exploring them and challenging them (accusing the accusations as it were) is a way to expand our world.
This is a rich theme and not one we are likely to be able to cover in a single note - but the idea here is to look at a few very simple examples of categories and how we can use them to understand the world differently.
Things and acts
One of the basic ways in which language shapes thought is to make us think of the world as made up of things and acts. The first are static, the second dynamic and as we start to study them we quickly get locked into the grammar (in the sense Wittgenstein uses the word ”grammar”) of things and the grammar of acts.
Take a simple example: technology. Our concepts of technology suggest that they are things - but the Ancient Greek conception of technology was as an act - techne - and so there is nothing given about technology being a thing.
In fact, if we view technology as an act we can suddenly also see that it is participatory - technology is an act that we all take part in and shape. The idea that we are victims of technology of starts from an image in which technology is a cause and our agency removed - this is the underlying logic of the many ”The Internet Made Me Do It”-arguments that surface in different debates - but if we instead note that we are participants in an act of technology - that we craft and create technology with our use and agency - the rhetoric of victims and causes fades away.
We have touched on this in an earlier note, where we looked at another categorization that is increasingly important - if something is a ”system” or a ”project”. If we see technology as s system we tend to believe that we are lost in it and at the mercy of the system’s designers, but if we instead view technology as a project - we can all change and influence the direction of the project.
A system is a thing, a project is an act.
This latter point is even more important when we talk about our societies. Many mature welfare societies have stopped thinking of themselves as projects and now, instead, tend to think they are systems that need to be calibrated, tweaked, repaired, fixed…the grammar of the system is one that increasingly makes it impossible to be a citizen and reduces us to users.
The idea of the ”user” is probably one of the most pervasive problems in tech policy today, since it is exclusionary and reductive. As someone noted - there are two kinds of users in language: technology users and drug users, and it is really telling that we call those addicted to narcotics users as well — it is a huge grammatical mistake that may very well set back the development if technology years!
Another way of thinking through things and acts is to analyze the world as nouns and verbs. For every noun you run into - ask why it was turned into a noun and if it can be hiding a verb! This is especially true for abstract nouns - like privacy. Privacy sounds like a state, a static thing, but privacy is constantly negotiated in a dizzying set of different domains. Privacy is a verb but we discuss it as a noun. We seem to think that privacy is a thing that can be ”preserved” or ”protected”, when the reality is that privacy is understood much more effectively and interestingly as a verb, as an act of negotiation and narrative.
It is much harder to find acts that are really things - something that is intriguing and worth thinking about - but there are examples of this as well - such as the idea that we ”like” content on social media. This is an example of a verb that is really better understood as a noun - and we know this, which is why we have started to talk about ”likes” and started to use the verb as a noun! A ”like” is a union of social approval that can be understood as a key to exploring social opinion and its distribution over time - the flow of likes is key to understanding how social views change.
Things and acts, verbs and nouns, systems and projects - these are grammatical framings that really matter - and not just as metaphors (as is brilliantly argued in Metaphors We Live By by Lakoff) but as necessary conceptual grammars of the world we live in.
Wholes and parts
Another simple and interesting distinction is the one between wholes and parts and the relationship of the parts to the whole. This is a set of questions that are sometimes grouped under the heading ”mereology” and has been studied for thousands of years by philosophers and other thinkers.
When we draw the lines for what is included in a whole and how the parts of the whole relate to the whole we determine our understanding of a system overall.
A simple example is the question of if we can plan our economies now that we have artificial intelligences of significant capability. One possible hypothesis is that communism and the planning of economies failed because of a lack of processing power and computing ability, but that the latest advantages in machine learning now allow us to plan our economies for real - and that we should slowly revert into a much more structured approach to our economies.
This hypothesis is interesting for many reasons, but most of all because of the hidden division of wholes and parts that we can tease out if we examine it more closely: here the planner is distinct from the economy and not a part of it - the image is that of a chess board and a player that makes the move on the board. That way the player / planner can make moves without changing the rules of the game / economy.
But is the planner really distinct from the economy? Or is this much more like a dance, where your next move changes the direction and pace of the dance and your partner changes your next set of choices? A dance includes the dancer / planner in the system in a very different way than a game of chess does.
If we think the economy is more like chess or more like a dance decides if we think the computational communism hypothesis is viable. The way we think about the parts relationship to the whole - as dynamic and interacting or separate and static - affects our entire analysis of the problem we are looking at.
This is true also for more generalized situations where we propose that there is an observer and a system: if the observer is part of the system we immediately end up with recursive change and the systems spiral into often complex and unpredictable behaviors.
Tech policy has had a tendency to think that innovation is a system that can be observed and curated from the outside, and that the way innovation works allow decision makers to consider a technology and its uses before they allow it into a society. This is the model of social technology choice that Plato proposes, or has Socrates propose, where king Thamus reviews all of the inventor Toth’s inventions and decides if they should be let free or not. But Thamus fails to stop writing from spreading, and in doing so shows that innovations relationship to society is not that of a separate domain that can be regulated, but one of human ingenuity seeking new powers and capabilities wherever they can be found.
That second model of innovation suggests that the ”technology completion”-hypothesis might be accurate - and that all that can be invented will be invented, and ultimately used.
The choice of wholes, parts and relationships between them changes the picture fundamentally and suggest different possible strategies for change - sometimes changing the whole is only possible if you understand you are a part of that whole.
Time
One of the most powerful categories we impose on the world is that of time. The way we look at the world though time reveals and obscures enormous landscapes of possibility. When we look at the world through quarters we miss challenges and opportunities that play out over decades, and when we get stuck in hours we miss the centuries.
Time can be divided into different units - as suggested above - and one way to think about that is to think about it as a question of resolution - high resolution of time into minutes or low resolution into decades - and the things we see depend on the resolution. Some patterns are more obvious at low resolution (these would be the slower pace layers suggested by Stewart Brand for example, including governance and legislative change) and others are only visible at high resolution.
We tend to increase resolution whenever we focus on a problem, but sometimes it can be really helpful to just squint and look at things from a decade lens. An interesting example is when we look at the many legislative initiatives aimed at tech today - they all seem aggressive and important, but if we squint and look again we see that they probably are limited by the geopolitical tensions between China and the US, and that while we undoubtedly will see regulation in the next 5 years, the same companies that are in the lead today will remain in the lead then, with a few additions but not many subtractions.
But time also has to do with other ways of seeing the world. The distinction between chronos and kairos highlights this well.
Chronos - sequential time - is important because it organizes causes and effects for us, and the way we identify cause and effect is another powerful way we shape our understanding of the world. A key example of this is the question of if technology radicalizes - where one hypothesis has been that users see radical content and then change their own views and become radicalized online. This sequence now seems less and less likely, and what happens is instead that someone is radicalized in a social context and the use of technology is as a way to augment that radicalization. It does not create it.
This is important: what we determine is the cause is often where we will get most leverage from our efforts to change the state of things - and so if we get causes wrong we risk wasting our efforts.
The sequencing of events in time is a key categorization we should challenge and examine closely.
But time can also be understood as Kairos - the opportune moment to act. Kairos is the moment the archer should release the arrow or the weaver ”draw the yarn through a gap that momentarily opens in the warp of the cloth being woven” as EC White puts it. The understanding of time as synchronized movement - as timing - allows us to grasp a larger pattern of time and set of sequences and not just the single sequence of a single cause and its effect.
Kairos is key to changing people’s minds - in Aristotle’s rhetoric it is the context of the proof given in a speech and it reminds us that for all arguments and all influence there is a time in which the other side will be ready to change their minds.
This understanding of time as the opportune moment asks an interesting question of the tech industry today: when is the time to start to challenge the tech lash? It seems clear that any challenge was meaningless post the Cambridge Analytica scandal, but at what point in the future will a challenge be possible? What would have to be true for a challenge to carry weight with even ardent skeptics?
Many hoped, I think, that the pandemic would be that moment - but it proved to early, and even if technology was essential to managing the pandemic as well as we did, the tech skepticism that saturated the public sphere has not disappeared yet, but there are some indications that this may be changing - and so the question could be what is most opportune at this point in time, what part of the argument plays well now, and in a year and in three years?
The tool of ten and twelve
Anyone interested in categories will at some point have heard of Aristotle’s ten categories and it is worth mentioning them here too as a tool for varying mental models. One way to think of Aristotle’s ten categories is to consider them dimensions of any mental model we are forming of a problem that can be challenged and explored more in detail.
The ten are, with the associated questions:
substance - what is this (primary) and what are its qualities (secondary)?
quantity - how many?
quality - what are the attributes of this?
relation - what does this stand in relation to?
place - where is this?
time - when is this and in what order?
position - how is this positioned relative to other things (above / below)?
doing - what does this do (to itself or others)?
having - what state is this in (examples would be armed, naked, shod)?
being affected - what is the thing being done unto?
This set of categories and questions allow us to explore almost any question in ways that will reveal our assumptions and pre-conceived ideas, but it can be cumbersome and difficult to use all ten. Usually it is enough to ask what we are underestimating - and I think that this will very from person to person. For me it is usually most useful to start thinking of something as related to something else to uncover how problems are often networks of actions and artifacts. I also find it helpful to think through time more rigorously, but you will find your own tools in this if you use the tool often enough.
Kant picked this up and developed his own, perhaps more abstract, set of categories, and they are also fascinating to dig deeper into. The four main ones are quantity, quality, relation and modality - but Kant then divided these into twelve different kinds that underpin possible judgments.
Kant’s development of the categories as the basis of anything that can be thought suggests the importance of categories in understanding the world - and he also noted that these are, in a sense, necessary. Kant’s twelve, then, are:
Quantity: unity / plurality / totality
Quality: reality / negation / limitation
Relation: Inherence and subsistence (substance and accident) / Causality and Dependence / Reciprocity or community
Modality: Possibility and impossibility / Existence and non-existence / Necessity or contingency
I prefer Aristotle’s categories to Kant’s, but you may not! I will leave it to the reader to work out the questions Kant would have you ask about your own mental models from his categories.
So what
We think the world in categories, and some of the categories really matter for the set of possible solutions and actions we can imagine. As we think through what we can do to develop effective ways to advocate or think through our policy challenges, categories are excellent tools. Here are a few things that come to mind:
How can we ensure that technology - and the Internet - returns to being an act and a project rather than a thing and system? One of the most pressing issues right now is to ensure that the Internet regains some of its deeply participatory nature and does not become a monumental architecture that increases the distance between us as citizens and human beings and the technology as an act. Today’s mental model relegates us to becoming ”users” and increasingly leads to a disconnect between our own ambitions and those of technological progress overall.
Try planning in decades and then do a retrospective and check your assumptions. What are the most meaningful things that happened in then last ten years - and which debates that are raging today are unlikely to still be raging in ten years?
Lay out the mental models you have in time. What are the causes and effects? When have you had and will you have opportune moments to affect the state of the world? Why?
Challenge your nouns. Where are they holding you back because you have turned what should be acts into things?
Map relationships more closely. Most issues and ideas are embedded in networks and related to a number of other points - and often these other points may be more open to argument than the issues we discuss.
And these are just a few things we can do as we start looking more closely into the categories we think in.
As always, thanks for reading!
Nicklas