This book begins and ends with the idea of the value and the creative power of the individual. That is the ultimate driver of prosperity in the modern world; it is the power that can get you the best things in life. Our tour in the middle will visit society, technology, politics, economics, culture, and the internet, but the first step on this journey will be one of self-discovery.
One day, about five years ago, something strange happened. One of my blog readers at www.marginalrevolution.com—her name is Kathleen Fasanella—wrote me and asked me very politely and intelligently to consider if I might be described by either Asperger’s syndrome or high-functioning autism. She thought I was, just from reading my writing, and she considered herself an Aspie, the current shorthand for Asperger’s syndrome. In her email she pointed out that I keep quite a bit of information in my head in a highly ordered fashion and that I have a command of many small facts in my areas of interest, namely culture and the social sciences. Apparently that was enough to set off her radar.
Now, I receive all sorts of email, so this didn’t sink in immediately. At first I found it vaguely insulting, a bit like the “crank” emails I receive with conspiracy theories about the Federal Reserve System. But I investigated the question further and the more I read about the phenomenon, the more I saw that, while I do not fit the typical public conception of an autistic or suffer from “low social intelligence,” I have many of the cognitive strengths and weaknesses of autism. In other words, I have an autistic cognitive style. I’ve since come to believe that this is a common cognitive pattern, including among some very successful people.
I was surprised by Kathleen’s message. A forty-one-year-old upper-middle-class white male who all his life felt like he belonged to the dominant group in American society, was suddenly faced with the suggestion that he could be part of a minority, and a very beleaguered minority at that. I have since become comfortable with my affiliation with autism, and indeed proud of it, but it’s not a thought I was ready for at the time.
One strong feature of autism is the tendency of autistics to impose additional structure on information by the acts of arranging, organizing, classifying, collecting, memorizing, categorizing, and listing. Autistics are information lovers to an extreme degree and they are the people who engage with information most passionately. When it comes to their areas of interest, autistics are the true infovores, as I call them. Autistics are sometimes portrayed as soulless zombies, but in fact they are the ones with the strongest interest in human codes of meaning. “Joy,” “passion,” and “autism” are probably not three words you are used to finding together but they are often a close fit.
“We all have our particular areas that we know very, very well” is what one autistic person said to me, and he did not have an advanced degree. Often autistics seek out work that satisfies their passion for information, whether it involves designing new software for a library, conducting a scientific experiment, or ordering ideas in the form of a book or a blog. Mark Donohoo, an autistic, spends a lot of his time studying the statistics of the Atlanta Braves and collecting baseball literature. Or to consider one more stereotypical case, Ethan, an autistic boy in kindergarten, was fascinated with railway schedules and read the schedules all day long online, at least until his mother restricted his hobby. The Metro-North was his favorite train to follow.
The notion of “ordering information” may sound a little dry, but it is a joy in our everyday lives, whether you are autistic or not. It should be familiar to anyone who has enjoyed alphabetizing books on a shelf, arranging photos in an album, finishing a crossword puzzle, or just tidying up a room. It’s not that anyone sits down and says “I want to do some ordering now,” but rather we are interested in specific features of our world. We have become infovores to help make the world real and salient for us. Ordering and manipulating information is useful, fun, alternately intense and calming, and it helps us plumb the philosophic depths. We are entering a world where the collection and ordering of information has reached baroque, extravagant extremes, and that is (mostly) a good thing. It is a path toward many of the best rewards in life and a path toward creating your own economy and taking control of your own education and entertainment.
As I read more, I began to see that the autistic mind-set about engaging with information is a powerful way to understand the whole world around us. Especially now.
Coping with information involves both cognition and overt behavior. Most of us can’t keep track of everything in our minds, so we call upon technology to help us, or as economists would say, we use capital goods. Because of the web, mental ordering has become very cheap and effective and thus it has become a very powerful social force.
Consider the rise in popularity of the iPod or the music-playing iPhone. Compact discs have become secondary and at least in the United States most music is now played on computers and computerlike devices. Having passed Wal-Mart in 2008, iTunes is now the biggest American music retailer. A 2008 survey showed that, when it comes to music, most young people don’t think anymore about buying compact discs. My nineteen-year-old stepdaughter, Yana, listens to almost all her music on her computer or her iPod. Her first year in college has come to a close, but to my initial horror it has yet to occur to her that she needs a stereo in her dorm room. The reality is that she has far more control over her musical life than I did at the same age, far more choice, and greater ease of access.
The physical design of the iPod is compelling but the looks are only one part of the appeal. The iPod and other MP3 players are mostly about reorganizing the relationship between music and your mind.
Users organize music into playlists to suit their moods, the friends they are with, or the kind of trip they are taking. Brazilian music gets one playlist, punk rock gets another, and “Songs I Fell in Love To” gets another yet. The “random shuffle” feature is prominent on the choice wheel, precisely because we want to be surprised by the music we hear, yet without giving up our role in controlling the final menu. Friends share and exchange iPods. The iPod is about owning music, classifying music, and identifying with music in new ways.
Your iPod, by arranging your music collection in a new way and giving you new power over its organization, actually makes that music sound better. You think of music as something more important, more worth spending time with, more special, and more of an extension of yourself. When “Bohemian Rhapsody” comes through your iPod ear-buds on random shuffle mode, it can sound wondrous. You reconnect with the whole music listening experience again, as if you were discovering the song for the first time at fifteen years old, as I once did. It’s well known in marketing circles that the hardest thing to sell consumers is “a lump of music”; instead a perceptive supplier will sell a new kind of music listening experience. This gadget brings together two things we love: great music and the deeply personal feeling of “being in control.” It’s no accident that Guy Hart-Davis’s published guide to using the iPod and iTunes fills 508 pages, and without much chaff or waste—and that doesn’t include information on the 2008 updates.
The economic structure of the industry has been upended since the advent of iTunes and the iPod. Music superstores, such as the now-bankrupt Tower Records, are in retreat. The music companies were used to a model where they ordered the songs for you, on something called an album. That’s mostly gone too. Most fans and consumers do the ordering on their own rather than pay a musical group or a company to do it for them. In other words, a lot of the value production has been moved inside the individual human mind.
The iPod offers inferior or at best equal sound quality to most traditional stereo systems (you can download higher-density, better-sounding songs, but this takes up lots of disk space and hardly anyone does it). The fact that most listeners don’t seem to care is another way of understanding what the iPod is about, namely reorganizing how the mind controls and orders music. Sound quality is an afterthought.
Compare the iPod to the music subscription services—such as Rhapsody and Napster, among others—that failed to lead the market. The subscription services had a good selection and at very reasonable prices, as they allowed listeners to hear the music they wanted, when they wanted. But you couldn’t own and manipulate the songs in the same way as with an iPod. You couldn’t control, shape, share, and reorganize the musical experience in the same way. The subscription services failed to generate much love, precisely because they offer less culturally useful software. When Rhapsody announced a total reorganization of its service in June 2008, it pointed in the direction of the iTunes/iPod experience.
Behavioral economists sometimes write of human beings as subject to “framing effects,” meaning that the presentation of the alternatives influences our choices. For instance we often choose more conservatively if the very same opportunity is described to us as a gain of something rather than as a loss of something. Or the presence of a very-high-calorie item on a menu—which we don’t order—makes us feel less guilty about later getting dessert. Usually the presumption is that framing effects are to be avoided. To be sure, many framing effects are irrational but framing effects help put the guts into our lives. We spend time and energy framing things in the right way so that we can enjoy them more or learn more from them. Framing helps us care and it gives meaning to our experiences. If you can’t afford that new Jaguar sedan, and you are instead battening down your economic hatches and cocooning at home, good framing is how to make that work for you. Good mental ordering is how you can create your own set of frames.
Framing and ordering shape even the social side of our lives. I really do feel more connected to the people who are my (well-ordered) Facebook friends or whom I follow on Twitter or in the blogosphere. Ordering people in these ways makes me think about who they are and why they are important to me.
The highly social Facebook makes us all infovores about our friends. Not only must you choose who is a friend and who is not, but you can add lots of structure to the mental universe of your friends. You can send them periodic iconlike gifts or ask them to take tests of similarity with you or try to befriend the “coolest” people. You can present and order every movie you have seen and every book you have read or every photo you have taken. You can have your web “tags,” blogs, diaries, and other forms of your personal web data and usage fed right into your Facebook page, thus making some of your ordering virtually effortless. Your “news feed,” now on the main Facebook personal page, orders what your friends are up to.
The average participant on the social networking site Facebook—and circa 2008 there are well over sixty million users—has 164 friends and visits the site numerous times a day. My acquaintance Alissa, an intensely social user of the service, has currently 294 Facebook friends and visits the site several times a day. She posts photos (110 at last count), exchanges messages, responds to party invitations, joins or quits “Facebook groups,” and of course recruits new friends. She “defriends” those people who do not keep in touch. At last count Alissa was a member of thirty-two Facebook groups, including Save the Polar Bears, Addicted to Starbucks, and Kids Who Hid in Dept. Store Clothing Racks While Their Mom Was Shopping. That’s what I call having an ordered online existence. Today it is the norm, not the exception.
Some users try to order as many different “friends” as they can. Steve Hofstetter once acquired about two hundred thousand friends on Facebook, if only to have the largest number of friends in the history of the service. He started off with a goal of ten thousand friends, then hit fifteen thousand friends, and eventually expanded to a hundred thousand and then two hundred thousand friends. At the time he had more than 1 percent of the college student population of Facebook as his friend. Eventually Facebook reset his profile because it got to the point that his page slowed down the loading of Facebook for other users. Facebook has since decided to limit the number of friends you can have to five thousand (circa 2008). But if you really like Steve, even if you can’t be his friend you can join his Facebook group; there is no limit on the number of members. Steve, by the way, has since decided to become a professional comedian.
So who is Steve Hofstetter? The most sociable guy in the world? Or an information junkie who accumulated nominal friends on Facebook for fun? Maybe he is a bit of both. Hofstetter himself noted: “Facebook’s programmers were not expecting to run into someone quite as obsessive as Steve Hofstetter.” There is even a Facebook group called “I’m not addicted to Facebook.” It is not uncommon for people, especially young people, to check Facebook fifteen times a day or more.
Totspot is billed as a Facebook for children. Parents set up profiles for their babies, who are sometimes no more than a few months old, and connect those profiles to the profiles of other babies, typically the babies of their friends. You can list your baby’s favorite foods, books, and nicknames. Some parents are visiting and updating the profiles once a day or more. And it’s not just Totspot; there is also Lil’Grams, Kidmondo, and others. Odadeo helps you keep track of your pledges to be a better dad and whether you have followed them.
For some people it’s not enough to catalog the babies of their friends. Many people also order their different social networking services, using FriendFeed, Fuser, 8hands, Gathera, and Secondbrain. On Wikipedia it’s called “social network aggregation.”
Fundamentally the relationship between human minds and human cultures is changing. Today culture is not just about buying and selling straightforward commodities such as books or compact discs. Each day more fun, more enjoyment, more social connection, and indeed more contemplation is produced on Facebook, blogs, YouTube, iPods, eBay, Flickr, Wikipedia, and Amazon.com—among other services—than had been imagined twenty or even ten years ago. No matter what the medium, much of the actual value today comes from readers, viewers, students, and consumers, as an “add-on” to what they are sent by corporations. More and more, “production”—that word my fellow economists have been working over for generations—has become interior to the human mind rather than set on a factory floor. Even when a major media corporation produces the pixels, viewers and listeners use their mental ordering to create the meaning and the interpretations, and that is where most of the value lies.
There is quite literally a new plane for organizing human thoughts and feelings and we are jumping on these opportunities at an unprecedented pace. If we look at how culture is supplied, distributed, and enjoyed, the last five years have brought more change than any comparable period in human history. The proper use of entertainment and education has become the most fundamental social enterprise.
In essence we are using tools and capital goods—computers and the web—to replicate or mimic some of the information-absorbing, information-processing, and mental-ordering abilities of autistics. You’ll read or hear some speculative claims about how using the web is “changing our brains,” or rewiring our brains, through the medium of neuroplasticity, but my message is more straightforward. The web allows us to borrow cognitive strengths from autism and to be better infovores, even if it doesn’t rearrange any of the wiring between our ears.
We’re applying mental ordering wherever we can. Earth itself can be viewed, classified, tagged, and mentally organized like never before. North Korean military installations and some other bits aside, Google Earth creates a tile-by-tile mosaic of the entire planet. There is tilt, zoom, rotation, and 3-D portrayals of major cities, all organized by zip code, address, or latitude and longitude. The layers function tells you where the public parks are, where an earthquake is most likely to strike, whether political refugees are streaming into a region, and whether you can view an area through a live webcam. Rowdy British teens use Google Earth to find neighbors’ empty pools to crash and commandeer for parties. Or you can embed your favorite YouTube video inside a picture of almost anywhere on the planet—you can listen to blues while watching the Mississippi Delta—or you can tour Disney in three dimensions. When you get bored with Google Earth, move on to Google Sky.
Delicious, which is now used by at least three million people, helps you create your own multidimensional website for indexing content on particular topics. You can tag websites and photos and come back to them whenever you want, thereby generating easy access. It’s also easy to visit the links and photos that other people have marked with the same keywords. You create your own private encyclopedia of content and meaning, but on the web rather than in your mind.
Personal photographs have become one of the most central manifestations of contemporary culture. It’s not that the quality of the photos is always so high, but rather that the pictures are used to weave together a memorable emotional narrative of family, vacation, and personal experience. The web service Flickr helps you order your photographs and share them with others. Right now Flickr offers more than two billion images, all laid out in a searchable order. I searched my own name and in less than two seconds I found four photos tagged (by other users) under my name, including a photo of myself and also a photo of a large stack of books. The new word for such sites is “folksonomy,” which combines the two roots of “folk” and “taxonomy.”
What is Wikipedia but a vast ordered, intellectual space to collate and effectively present the factual and analytical knowledge of mankind? It is one of the most impressive projects of ordering that human beings have undertaken.
It would be a mistake to think that our new infatuation with information and ordering is about the mind at the expense of the body. Even when we do the most physical, the most exuberant, and the most sensual life activities, we are still imposing new mental orders on our choices.
The website Bedpost (www.bedposted.com) helps users map their sex lives online. The instructions are pretty clear: “Simply log in after every time you have sex and fill out a few simple fields. Before long, you’ll have a rolling history of your sex life on which to reflect. Use the tagging feature to provide even deeper insight into your activities, and use the partner feature to record as many partners as you encounter.”
The location tracker Brightkite organizes where you have been and My Mile Marker helps you record your driving habits, including when you filled up your vehicle with fuel. The Garmin Forerunner 305 GPS watch looks like a regular digital wristwatch. But if you wear it when you run, a record of your exertions can be downloaded to your computer. It keeps a running tally (how many miles did you really run last month?) and it can export information directly to your Facebook account. There is a website—everytrail.com—where you can share your trips with others and automatically “geotag” your photos. Web tracking also is being used to enforce diets, quit smoking, aid or prevent conception, and cure bad habits.
The basic idea behind the new web innovations is to take a blooming, buzzing mass of overwhelming confusion—modern information, in its richness and glory—and impose some local coherence on it, thereby turning it into usable form. That process reflects how we cope every day. But wait…it’s a familiar principle. For purposes of comparison, Kamran Nazeer, a British lawyer, policy advocate, and author who describes himself as autistic, suggests the following portrait:
An autistic person might have a different hierarchy, or might have no hierarchy at all of sense data. That’s what often happens with autistic people when they feel overwhelmed by their surroundings. It’s because they’re not forming a hierarchy of sense data, it’s because they’re taking on all the sense data, it’s random, and as you can imagine, we’re always overwhelmed by sense data. But the reason why we don’t feel overwhelmed is because we have a hierarchy for sorting them out. I think that what often happens with autistic people is that they don’t hierarchize. Either they don’t hierarchize in the same way, or they don’t hierarchize at all?…A lot of autistic people display what I and many other people have called desire for local coherence. So because they’re not forming a hierarchy of sense data, which ultimately is the only way in which we can stop ourselves from feeling overwhelmed in the world, what they do instead, instead of forming the hierarchy, they ache for some simple way of bringing order to the chaos around them.
For a typical person, you encounter the web, and you feel overwhelmed, but you figure out how to impose some local coherence in your own way, if only by using Google search or going to your “favorite places” bookmarks. You resort to some mental ordering, usually with the aid of technology. At first you’re just struggling to keep up, but the more time you spend on the web, the more you are in control. You move from bookmarks to Facebook to Twitter and then to hyper-specialized sites for ordering the details of your life. You move from bewilderment to a sense of increasing mastery.
Economists have studied our species as homo economicus, and some decades ago, when my social science colleagues investigated our game-playing nature, homo ludens was born. Today a new kind of person creates his or her very own economy in his or her head. The age of homo ordo is upon us.
We’re going to come back to the web and what it means for how society is changing, but first let’s look at the people who have been the mental orderers par excellence. Whatever the tragedies of autism may be, we can learn a great deal from autistics and from their cognitive strengths. They remain a surprising key to understanding where our world has been and where our world is headed.