(2010-10-06) Doctorow Steven Johnsons Where Good Ideas Come From Multidisciplinary Hymn To Diversity Openness And Creativity

Cory Doctorow: Steven Johnson's Where Good Ideas Come From: multidisciplinary hymn to diversity, openness and creativity. Good Ideas is a sweeping survey of many, many inventions, some dating back to antiquity, and a comparison of these innovations to the innovations that occur on the grand scale — in the natural evolution of new species and ecosystems — and on the micro-scale — the way that neuronal clusters alternate between synchronized, orderly firing and wild chaos to birth new ideas.

This is the heart of Johnson’s thesis: that there are similarities to be found (and lessons to be learned) between the way that physics, chemistry and biology innovate to create successful variations in life; the way that humans work together to create successful new technologies; and the way that human brains accomplish the strange business of imagining new things, seemingly out of thin air.

for Johnson, this thin air is anything but: rather, it is a relatively predictable outcome arising from certain pre-conditions.

Wherever you have a lot of spare parts lying around, a lot of disciplines crossing paths, a reliable system for propagating good ideas, and an environment that doesn’t unduly punish failed experiments or wall off certain areas of exploration lest they disrupt the status quo, innovation emerges.

Johnson makes a convincing case that innovation is fractal.

This is stirring stuff: a strong defense of open networks, shared ideas, serendipity (he even cites Boing Boing as a counter to doomsayers who say that the net’s directed search creates a serendipity-free echo chamber) and minimal control over ideas so that they can migrate to those who would use them in ways their “creators” can’t conceive of.

These are axioms for many of us who grew up with the Internet and the Web, but to see these axioms defended with reference to history, paleontology, evolutionary biology, urban planning, and other diverse disciplines is heartening indeed.