A Thousand Years of NonLinear History is a must read for anyone remotely interested in cylical or systems thinking. To approach the history of mankind with the same model as a scientists approaches a thermodynamics problem could be one of the most ingenious ideas I’ve read to date. De Landa walks you (through myriads of systems storytelling) into the philosophical world of Lavas and Magmas, Flesh and Genes, and Memes and Norms on a quest, not for optimum efficiency or evolutionary fitness, but for a moment or two of balance between the phase shifts that are our historic eras. In my opinion, every scientist, designer and thinker should read this book – if only for the priveledge of following the thoughts of such a well-learned man.
Check out some of my favorite quotes, ideas and the loads of references I’ll be reading up on:
quotes:
“Imperfect knowledge, incomplete assessment of feedback, limited memory and recall, as well as poor problem-solving skills result in a form of rationality that attains not optimal decisions but more or less satisfactory compromises between conflicting constraints. ” (p. 42)
“But [in bureaucracies], too, decision making takes place in a world full of unceratinties. Any actual system of information processing, planning and control will never be optimal but merely practical, applying rote responses to recurrent problems and employing a variety of contingency tactics to deal with unforeseen events.”
“for an urban ecosystem to work food chains must be shortened and certain organisms must be used to redirect the flow of biomass toward the top of the hierarchy” (p. 153)
“the obligatory acquisition of certain information which counts as part of our ability to use the word” (p. 191) describes a social factor explaining “how labels stick to their referents”
“The very idea of massified advertising meant that large cirulation newpapers were not in the business of selling information to people but rather of selling the attention of their readers to commercial concerns… to tap into the resorvoir of resources constitutred by the growing urban populations.” (p. 243)
“Although many see this computer meshwork principally as a valuable reservoir of information, its main conrtibution may one day be seen as a catalyst for the formation of communities (and hence as a reservoir of emotional, technical, and other types of support). Since communities bound by common interests existed long before computers, it is not as if we have now entered the next stage in the evolution of society (the “information age”). Rather, computer meshworks have created a bridge to a stable state of social life which existed before massification and continues to coexist alongside it.” (p.254)
“That is, not simply to assume that society forms a system, but to account for this systematicity as an emergent property of some dynamical process… we must take into account that the larger-scale structures that emerge from the actions of individual decision makers, such as formal organizations or informal networks, have a life of their own. They are wholes that are more than the sum of their parts, but wholes that add themselves to an existing population of individual structures, operating at difference scales (individual institutions, individual cities, individual complexes of cities, and so on).” (p. 270)
“Precautions … derive from a recognition that our world is governed not only by nonlinear dynamics, which makes detailed prediction and control impossible, but also by nonlinear combinatorics, which implies that the number of possible mixtures of meshwork and hierarchy, of command and market, of centralization and decentralization, are immense and that we simply cannot predict what the emergent properties of these myriad combinations will be. Thus the call for a more experimental attitude toward reality and for an increased awareness of the potential for self-organization inherent in evenn the humblest forms of matter-energy.” (p. 273)
other researchers and concepts mentioned:
Richard Newbald Adams, The Eighth Day: Social Evolution as the Self-Organization of Energy
Lynn White, Jr. “The Life of the Silent Majorty” – mutually enhancing exploitive innovations for agriculture lead to the birth of Europe
William McNeill, The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society since AD 1000 – the west conquered because of a mix of centralized and decentralized decision making
Fernand Braudel, Capitalism and Material Life – dynamic patterns of urban evolution in the West
Howard Odum, Energy Basis for Man and Nature
Douglas North, institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance – neoinstitutionalist economist
Paul Hohenberg & Lynn Hollen Lees The Making of Urban Europe – “Network System” models of recent urban historians
Walter Christaller – 1930’s “Central Place”
Peter Allen, “Self-Organization in the Urban System” – non-linear dynamical models
Dimitros Dendrinos – Urban Evolution
Herbert Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial
Stuart Kauffman
Norman Packard, “Dynamics od Development: A Simple Model for Dynamics Away from Attractors”
Jane Jacobs – “symbiotic collections of little enterprises”
Terry M. Moe, The Politics of Structural Choice: Toward a Theory of Public Bureacracy
Joseph Schumpeter
JD Sherman, Nonlinear Dynamics in World Economy: The Economic Long Wave
John Kenneth Galbraith
Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, A Thousanf Plateaus – capitalism could have arisen anywhere (and did?)
Dennis Mueller – the corporation and the economist
Anne Querrian – the metropolis & the Capital
Paul Kennedy – the rise & fall of great powers
Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding – everything is said by the observer
Arthur Iberall
Zelling Harris, A Theory of Language & Information: A Mathematical Approach
Howard Pattee
Magorah Maruyana, “Symbiotization of Cultural Heterogeneity: Scientific, Epistemological and Aesthetic Bases” – feedback causality, positive feedback is “deviation amplyifying”
Norman Weiner
Stanislav Ulam
Heinz Von Foerster
Michael Radzicki – “Institutional Dynamics: Deterministic Chaos and Self-Organizing Systems
Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man – “fortuitous accumulations of complexity”
Seymoor Melmann
Brian Arthur – network externalities due to positive feedback
George F. Ray
Thomas Newcomen – inventor 1712 steam engine
Eugene Ferguson – Engineering & The Mind’s Edge
Ian Inkster
George Stephenson – “rocket” locomotive inventor
Roger Burlingame
Charles F. O’Conell – military and big business management
Robert C. Davis
Harry Braveman
Merrit Roe Smith
David A Hounshell
Oliver Willamson – replacement of markets with hierarchies
Adolf Berle
William Lazonick – joint stock companies
Roy Lubove – urban planning in Kransberg & Pursell
Peter Drucker – “technological trends of the twentieth century”
Gilbert Ryle – The Concept of Mind
Richard Nelson & Sydney Winter
Annalee Saxenian – lessons from Silicon Valley
James B. Bright – automation
Ian G. Simmons – biographer, “Changing the Face of the Earth”
George Cowan, Complexity: Metaphors, Models & Reality
C.S. Holling, Resilience & Stability of Ecosystems
Thomas F. Glide, Science, Technology and the Urban Environment
Claude Levi Strauss – the raw and the cooked
Richard Dawkins, Selfish Gene – extended phenotype
Elliot Sober – evolutionary theory in philosophical focus
Willam Y Adams, On Migration & Diffusion as Rival Paradigms
Barry Bogin, Rural to Urban Migration
Edith Ennen – the medieval worm
Carter & Dale, Top Soil & Civilization
Pierre Clastres, Society against the State
KW Jean & JF Danielli
John Holland, Adaptation in Natural and Artificial Systems
Kevin Laland
Peter Richerson
Robert Boyd, “Animal Social Learning towards a New Theoretical Approach”
John T. Bonner, The Evolution of Culture in Animals
Colinvaux, The Fates of Nations: A Biological Theory of History
Donald Brown, Human Universals
William Durham, Coevolution
Alfred Crosby – ecological imperialism
Sidney Mintz, Sweetness & Power
Michael Foucault, Discipline & Punish
Richard Scott, Symbols & Organizations from Barnard to the Institutionalists
Devries, The Dutch Rural Economy in the Golden Age
Gena Corea, The Mother Machine: Reproductive Technologies from Artificial Insemination to Artificial Wombs
JD Murray, Mathematical Biology
Dorothy Nelkin & Lawrence Tancerdi, Dangerous Diagnostics: the Social Power of Biological Information
ML Samuels, Linguistic Evolution
Peter Burke & Roy Porter, The Uses of Literacy in Early Modern Italy
Gottleb Frege, On Sense and Meaning
Saul A Kripke, Naming & Necessity
Salmon, Reference & Essence
Hilary Putnam, The Meaning of Meaning
Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols
Milroy, Languages & Social Networks
John Nist, A Structural History of English
Ian Hancock, Recovering Pidgin Genesis
Hymes, Pidginization & Creolization of Languages
Parker, The Rise of Vernaculars in Early Modern Europe
Labov, Sociolinguistic Patterns
Ivan Illich, Vernacular Values & Education
Bill Bryson, The Mother Tongue
Herzel, Steinecke, Mende, Wernike, Chaos & Bifurcations during Voice & Speech
George Zipf, The Phsycho-biology of Language; An Introduction to Dyanmic Philogy
Mary Douglas, “Introduction to Group/Grid Analysis”
Tony Crowley, Standard English & the Politics of Language
Rubin & Jermudd, Can Language be Placed?
Ian Stewart, Does God Play Dice?
JE Gordan, The Science of Structures and Materials
This review can also be found on my Goodreads.
