In a way, the idea for this book began with a thirtieth-birthday present—actually, two separate presents that by coincidence happened to be the same book, one from my father and one from my oldest friend, the architect and Web designer Eric Liftin. The book in question was a large-format atlas of nineteenth-century city maps, and it included a striking image of Hamburg that looked uncannily like a profile view of a human brain. I had been following two separate tracks of reading over the preceding year—one on cities and the other on the mind. Somehow that image of Hamburg triggered a vague connection in my head, and I began to wonder if perhaps the two paths harbored a secret intersection.
Other roots should be mentioned. I’d written about complexity theory and culture for a 1996 Lingua Franca essay. A few pages of this book originate with a 1998 Harper’s piece on pattern-matching and the Alexa software, an essay that itself developed out of the “Agents” chapter from my last book, Interface Culture. In early 1999, I wrote an introduction to ID Magazine’s year-end-awards issue that addressed control in interactive design and video games. Brill’s Content was kind enough to let me ruminate on Robert Wright’s “global brain” idea for a few thousand words, as I was in the middle of finishing the manuscript. And much of this book connects with something I wrote or edited for FEED over the past few years—particularly our special issues on the brain, video games, and cities. So a special thanks to all my editors over the past six years: my coeditor-in-chief at FEED, Stefanie Syman; Alex Star; Sam Lipsyte; Amanda Griscom; Austin Bunn; James Ryerson; Alex Abramovich; Ben Cosgrove; Deborah Shapiro; Elaine Blair; Christiane Culhane; Mark Van de Walle; David Kuhn; Susan Burton; Franco Moretti; and Chee Perlman. Stefanie, Jamie, and Eric were also kind enough to read early versions of this manuscript. (My colleague Matt Goldberg read the manuscript by osmosis.) I’m grateful to them for their comments and suggestions. They are, of course, responsible for any errors, and all the good parts are mine.
I was afforded a unique opportunity during the writing of this book, in that parts of my day job at Automatic Media involved helping with the design and implementation of self-organizing software: mainly in our Plastic.com site, which was built on the Slashdot code. It’s not often that a writer gets to build something as he or she is writing about it, and it’s equally unusual to get to do that building in the company of so many bright minds. So, special props to Lee deBoer, Joey Anuff, Matt Goldberg, Michael Kolbrener, Freyja Balmer, Jon Phelps, Rob Francis, and J. J. Gifford. They deserve extra credit for suffering through all my overcaffeinated riffs on clusters and pointer nodes.
This book was greatly enhanced by interviews I conducted with Manuel De Landa, Richard Rogers, Deborah Gordon, Rob Malda, Jeff Bates, Oliver Selfridge, Will Wright, David Jefferson, Evelyn Fox Keller, Rik Heywood, Mitch Resnick, Steven Pinker, Eric Zimmerman, Nate Oostendorp, Brewster Kahle, Andrew Shapiro, and Douglas Rushkoff. I recall more than a few casual conversations that also had an impact, primarily ones that involved David Shenk, Ruthie Rogers, Roo Rogers, Mitch Kapor, Kevin Kelly, Annie Keating, Nicholas Butterworth, Kim Hawkins, Rory Kennedy, Mark Bailey, Frank Rich, Denise Caruso, Liz Garbus, Dan Cogan, Penny Lewis, John Brockman, Rufus Griscom, Jay Haynes, Betsey Schmidt, Stephen Green, Esther Dyson, and my students at NYU’s ITP program, where Red Burns generously invited me to teach a graduate seminar on emergent software. My family, as always, was a constant source of ideas and encouragement—particularly my two direct connections to the world of medicine, my mother and my sister Sallie.
For most of the writing of this book, Andrew Shroeder played an invaluable role as research assistant, tracking down obscure essays and reading alongside me. (Jay Demas and Josh Saunders also helped with important research along the way.) My agent, Lydia Wills, once again did a masterful job of nudging an unwieldy first-draft proposal toward something that could actually be published. My editor at Penguin UK, Stefan McGrath, made a number of timely and astute contributions to the draft manuscript. At Scribner, Rachel Sussman was incredibly patient with my late arrivals. As for my gifted editor Gillian Blake—not only did she not flinch when I told her about my idea of opening the whole book with slime molds, she also provided exactly the conceptual and sentence-by-sentence guidance that I needed in putting together a complicated, multithreaded book.
Then there’s my wife, Alexa Robinson. There is no finer line editor in the land, and no better advocate, sounding board, and support system. She is, in more ways than one, my ideal reader. This book—along with our marriage—turns out to be one of those future collaborations I alluded to in the last acknowledgments, but I’m fairly sure there are more to come.
Nearly four years ago, days after Alexa and I moved into our apartment in the West Village, I finally got around to reading Jane Jacobs’s Death and Life of the Great American Cities. I knew Jacobs had lived in the Village while writing the book, but I didn’t know the exact whereabouts. From the very first chapter it was clear that she must have lived somewhere nearby. About a hundred pages in, with the help of the Web, I tracked down her actual residence: no more than three blocks from our apartment. All through the writing of this book, I could see the roof of Jacobs’s old building from the study I was working in. I could see the rooftops and the sidewalks of the whole West Village sprawled out below me, the urban ballet that Jacobs had written about so powerfully forty years before. If books like this one require acknowledgments, they have to start—or end—with that great, shifting energy and its connective powers. This is a city book, both in subject matter and in inspiration. If you’re reading these words in a comparably thriving city, put the book down, step outside into the roaring streets, and make your own connections.