(2017-05-26) Rao Frankenstacks And Rhizomes

Venkatesh Rao on Frankenstacks and Rhizomes

Today, each of us lives within what I call a frankenstack. An assemblage of information technologies duct-taped together with a mess of protocols, and forming what philosophers call a rhizomatic structure

With a piece of ginger, there is no clear absolute orientation around an up, and no clear distinction between horizontal and vertical.

If you tend to use the cliched "hierarchies versus networks" metaphor for talking about old versus new IT, you would do well to shift to the rhizomatic/arborescent distinction. (How does this relate to the "Complicated vs Complex" mapping of Cynefin and others?)

Consider the difference between an onion and a piece of ginger. The ginger root is the motif for what philosophers call a rhizome. The onion for what they call an arborescence.

If you work in a large organization defined by an enterprise IT system, your frankenstack is likely more arborescent than mine. More onion-like

But this is not going to last much longer.

Hierarchies and networks are both clean, legible architectural patterns. Applying them to high dimensional situations is highly budrensome and largely useless.

All of us today live informationally high-dimensional lives

consider an organization that's a strict network topology. You could model it with a graph: who is connected to whom. "Degrees of separation" is a dependent variable.

you could have different complicating factors: asymmetry vs symmetry in follows, algorithmically maintained feeds that drive interactions, and so forth.

With each complicating factor, more new variables enter the picture. The dimensionality increases. However, not all dimensions are equally important.

you switch to only modeling things that have information content, and doing so piecemeal. You end up with "crumpled" versions of high-dimensional structures in low-dimensional spaces.

In my rhizome picture above for example, there are a dozen dimensions (the words in green). But I have a loose, gingery representation in 3d space

Tools with rhizomatic dispositions include, besides cut-and-paste (Copy And Paste) and Spreadsheets, things like IFTTT, Zapier, and at the enterprise level, things like Microservices.

The archetypal action in a rhizomatic information architecture is cut-and-paste. The spreadsheet is the archetypal integration tool: a sort of generalized clipboard.

Rhizomes aren't just about information. They are also about computational capabilities, distribution capabilities, relationships, trust, and permission architectures.

Two of the biggest technologies evolving today -- the Blockchain and Machine Learning -- are fundamentally rhizomatic in their DNA

What is it like to live in a rhizome? Well for starters, there are no default entry or exit points, no "onboarding manual" that teaches you how to survive in one, and no "up."

A rhizome is also a high-friction space. Movement through a rhizome involves an unpredictable stream of transaction costs. Every journey is an obstacle course

Effort-outcome relationships get out of whack

You've heard of analysis paralysis, right? I have a similar concept I call aesthetic paralysis: the desire for elegance in behavior limiting your agency. Superficial beauty is expensive in a rhizome.

You start to gain what a friend of mine just described as "infrastructure fluency." This is in a way the opposite of architectural taste: an ability to experience the artificial world in its natural language.

You start to be less attached to received ideas of importance, order, and logic, and learn to interact with the natural logic of the environment.