Steven Johnson: Emergence: The Connected Lives Of Ants, Brains, Cities, And Software

As editor of the sorely missed online magazine FEED, Steven Johnson exposed the porousness of certain borders around pop culture, science, and technology by exercising arcane theoretical constructs in decidedly real-world contexts. From its early days as one of the web's first publishing experiments, FEED covered disparate subjects (from semiotics and string theory to pop music and TV) with an accessible voice that borrowed from the more earnestly purposeful reaches of cultural studies and the searching seriousness of the high sciences. In Emergence, Johnson revisits many of his magazine's tailored interests, stitching them together with insight and ambition. Simply stated, emergence is the process by which a systematic whole becomes more than the sum of its parts. Using the working order of ant colonies as a focal point, Johnson follows the idea of emergence, or "swarm logic," as it plays out in various forms. Ant colonies, for example, grow more efficient over their life spans even though no single ant is "calling the shots." Colonies progress and "learn" for up to 15 years, although individual ants live only 12 months. While Johnson's meditation on ants alone makes the book worthwhile, he gets even more interesting when discussing how the process reveals itself in similarly decentralized systems that develop "intelligence" through bottom-up, rather than top-down, channels. Johnson follows the emergent forces at work in the human brain—which achieves its unthinkable levels of complexity without a previously determined master plan—and the development of cities, which regulate themselves in ways not immediately attributable to their individual inhabitants. Compelling as such background is, though, Johnson is most inspired by the emergent properties intrinsic to the technological revolution, from the beginnings of software design to the newly adaptive qualities of video games and the web. The earliest developments in computer programming, including the elegantly reductive language of zeros and ones, were directly modeled on ants' communal behavior. From there, the story of programming has revolved around the creation of systems that teach themselves through deceptively simple pattern recognition. Showing his chops as one of technology's most probing thinkers, Johnson traces the narrative from the 1940s to the present, when amazon.com can make eerily appropriate recommendations to repeat customers, and video games such as the city-simulating SimCity call for players to "grow" a game rather than "play" it. Emergence's confluence of ideas is miraculous, but Johnson's ability to write about such heady stuff in endlessly engaging ways proves even more so. By striking a congenial balance between evenhanded cultural criticism and excited fandom, Johnson has written a book that, like its subject matter, inspires all sorts of intellectual imaginations to come together in enlightening unity.