A hedgehog and a fox walk into a bar…

Went over to Robust and R.’s place for a typical Saturday evening of good food, good friends, and a little geeky action. We got our grill on: C. made ribs and they were fucking amazing. Then we got our game on–the previously mentioned Vampire game where we are all mortals (i.e., food). We ended a little earlier than normal (meaning 1 a.m. instead of 4 a.m.) when J.’s head began to nod, but those of us more caffienated stuck it out a bit longer.

And by a bit longer, I mean it’s now 6 a.m. and I just got home. What could occupy a geeky foursome (threesome after about 2:30) for that long? Shockingly, it was neither video games nor television.

We were sitting around on the back porch, surrounded by citronella lights and pine trees. We were chatting, as we often do, about books, about literature, politics, or science; about things we read on the internet or think about idly. You know, the shit college-educated middle-class quasi-intellectual somewhat-dorky white people discuss on the weekends.

The topic turned to… media distribution. Information flow. R. commented that he was greatly concerned that the coming generations would find a world resplendant with sound bites, and lacking in expert opinion, wise guidance, truth-tellers, and genius. He described (as best I can explain it, considering the entire discussion bubbled so furiously because Robust and I vigorously disagreed) today’s world as one where commoditization of content had rendered the information flow dangerously tainted. He described the world as one where substance is largely deep-sixed in favor of the flashy and simplistic. Art, he fretted, would one day be in danger because of the proliferation of poor imitation at rock-bottom prices.

We spoke, at length, in allegory. We agreed upon the premise that all subject-matter experts were hedgehogs. We also agreed that all broadly curious folks–those who know a little about a lot of things–were foxes.

R.’s postulate was that the modern media outlets–that being the broad (and noisy) world of the internets, the integrated offerings of major networks and media conglomerates, the fast-fact sound bite culture, the ability for anyone and everyone to self-produce and distribute almost anything–throws such a wide range of options at people, there is really no time for serious study of any one subject. Serious study is in fact discouraged. This may increase the number of foxes, but at the expense of hedgehogs. A dwindling supply of hedgehogs will eventually result in an intellectual decline, as experts are a critical part of society who provide specialized skills (and instruction in those skills) that we need.

Various examples were proposed. An early mention was domesticity–that is, the arts of cooking and homemaking. (This of course led to some quick feminist and post-feminist back-and-forth, which pretty much discounted this as an example worth working out. Too many other variables, largely financial and social/moral in nature, made it difficult to compare behavior over time.) R. remarked, in the same vein, that the general trend toward prepared meals (Fox-ness, because prepared foods allow someone with a little knowledge to cook.) and away from home-cooked meals (Hedgehog territory, cooking “from scratch” being an learned and practiced art.) was an example of the kind of loss of deep knowledge the modern world can ill afford.

Other less contentious subjects included politics: The constant battle for and seeming importance of popularity in an election is also, said R., the result of media saturation and mass-market polling. Parties spent countless millions trying to convince us that the other guy sucks, because that’s an easier way to get votes than actually selling their own platform. Why? Because the masses will choose exciting spectacle over boring policy specifics. Without hedgehogs, he says, we are all gullible foxes.

Allegory, again, is our friend. The modern world is a buffet. 12 different cuisines. Something for everyone. Maybe not the best in the world of anything, but exactly what you want, when you want it. The thing we’re might lose, R. warned, is the expert. The fabulous BBQ joint. The exquisite Thai place. Can we afford to miss out on something exceptional? Perhaps we already are. Wal-Mart and Targets are squeezing out the local stores, the kitschy boutiques. Are we losing art for convenience? Must we lose art for convenience + evolution? Is that the cost?

Robust’s take (and mine too, for the most part) was that that was the nature of change. And that change is the nature of the world. We live, we grow, we die. To stop changing is death.

We got more concrete. We talked at length about the nature of information on the internet, and the internet as a tool and commodity. There’s a lot of stuff out on the web, only some of it true. Lots of it is crap, and lots of it is so specialized to render it obsolete for all but a special (and often very freaking weird) few. Does all this excess data sometimes drown out the truth? If this is our new media, our new journalism… how do we ensure the “right” message is the one that gets out, instead of the one that is (a) most popular (b) best managed or (c) shouted most loudly?

Robust and I believe it is incumbant on the consumer to determine the truthfulness of the source, and to investigate the claims. The question was posed: Does good information push bad information out? Robust argued for this. I wavered.

By wavering, I mean that my answer is both yes and no. Sometimes good info (things with cold, hard facts) does push bad info out. But, right now, bad info can, on about the same scale, push out good info. At this point, taking in the material on the internet is like trying to drink from a firehose. It’s still a pretty new concept, at least for a hell of a lot of people, and as more folks get online (in industry parlance, “as the internet becomes a ubiquitous resource”), it’s only going to get newbie-er. There’s so much stuff going out there and so much stuff never going away, regardless of its retro vibe, that it’s hard to take it all in. Until we are able to do a better job sorting it out and searching it for what we want exactly, we’re kind of at the mercy of our (very blunt) instruments.

Don’t get me wrong. Google is an awesome instrument. But it is, in effect, a whole lot of foxes all chained together. Is it the equivalent of a hedgehog?

This is, of course, where we start talking about what I feel I’ve been talking an awful lot about lately, and that’s collaboration vs. the lone genius. This is the hot topic at work, where the group falls firmly on the side of collaborators. To the extent that I’ve heard D. say “There is no such thing as a lone genius. Frank Lloyd Wright is dead.”

Now, ok, I love me some FLW. I hear that Fallingwater stinks like a sewer, but still–pretty genius stuff. But, y’know, he is dead and so (hopefully) are the 70s. But does that mean his genius is dead?

[Note: I, without thinking about it a bit, googled to make sure he was dead. Fact-checking? SO much easier in this century.]

If FLW is dead, and there is no such thing as a lone genius–then doesn’t that mean that hedgehogs have disappeared? Perhaps R. is right, and I’m naive to think that technology will allow foxes to be foxes and tolerate hedgehogs being hedgehogs. Or that perhaps, among the foxes, there are some general foxes who are hedgehogs in a given field. Geniuses, as it were. But then… FLW can’t be dead.

Yes, it does get confusing when allegories collide.

8 responses to “A hedgehog and a fox walk into a bar…”

  1. brian Says:

    Collaboration among idiots is still just a bland, boring committee. If you really want a diverse group, you need a group of lone geniuses willing to quickly look over each other’s work just long enough for proofreading.

  2. bascha Says:

    And, see–there’s the rub. By definition, a ‘group of lone genuises’ is an oxymoron. You’re either lone or a group, not both, regardless of size or frequency/depth of contact.

  3. brian Says:

    But there is a very important distinction in this vein that can be made, as real life isn’t as black and white as some might wish. You can have a group of people who divide an conquer the problems, or you can have a group of people who hash out all the problems only when they have quorom. No oxymoron, but it isn’t very hard to see which group behaves as highly independent lone geniuses.

    The lone geniuses may not do everything, but they are vital. Just as vital as the (allegedly) un-named people who clean up the body of work for presentation to the masses who could care less about the aesthetic of the ragged bleeding edge. As has been pointed out, Frank Lloyd Wright is dead. Gehri is not. A flock of renowned artists, if not most of them, in any field basically behave as lone geniuses. Musical works are much more likely to be an assembly constructed by one person than ever before. Most successful computer programs start out as one person’s idea, who then convinces several other people to help out by handing them a chunk of the work, wholesale. In politics, it’s starting to look much better to be independent than part of a conspiracy - at least often enough to disprove the idea that only oligarchies are successful while individual leaders universally languish. Any chef on television (a genre growing in popularity against sitcoms and dramas) must both lead a group and indepently produce creative work, pointing to the value of each role.

    Being in a group means being able to survive, nothing more, now just as it was 2 million years ago. Survival is very, very important. But being independant has historically been absolutely essential to changing society. One cannot deviate from the status quo when one must convince a larger group to conduct all the experiments.

  4. brian Says:

    As a final coffin nail, consider where this discussion is taking place online now, as opposed to where it would have taken place online 10 years ago.

    Punk is dead, long live punk.

  5. bascha Says:

    Sorry, dude, it doesn’t matter where or how the genuises interact. The very facet of splitting up the work, saying “You do this piece and I’ll do that one” is happy collaboration.

    Yeah, Gehry is alive. But what’s he up to? He’s working with Brad Pitt and Bono to build new, different, interesting stuff and reduce world hunger/poverty. (The One campaign?)

    And how can you say that musical works are “much more likely” to be constructed by one person? I concede, of course, that technology makes the whole one-man-band a bit easier than it was before (buying all those instruments got expensive quick), but on the same hand, technology has made it far easier to send a few tracks to your buddy to add on to, or to crack open even the Beatles’ storied catalog and make your own remix (Grey album, anyone?). Those are not pieces of lone genius. There are geniuses, sure–collaborative work doesn’t discount the sheer temerity and brilliance of some folks.

    The quality in the spotlight is the lone portion of this equation, and none of your examples seem to me to be people operating in a vacuum. To the contrary, people are always operating in society, influenced by other hands, and producing work that they’d of course love to call their own entirely… but I’m not so sure it ever really is.

  6. brian Says:

    People have never operated in a vacuum. Almost every example of the lone genius, if the term isn’t solely a strawman, is an individual who worked with others. Artists work in schools, even Frank Lloyd Wright - held up as the sole example - worked with other people to build his houses. Those houses didn’t exist in a vacuum either.

    My point is that rather than create a strawman in a vacuum, consider the real-life folks who approximate what is meant by “lone genius” and consider how they work in comparison to the least-common denominator pack mentality. I’d epitomize the group with real-life bastions of groupthink like IBM (legendary even among C.S. majors for squashing individuality), burger franchises, and the pre-reformation Roman Catholic church. Those are practical examples. They survive, they even spread and become hegemonies. But they don’t do anything progressive within the fields that they claim. They all declined sharply in the face of relatively ingenius competitors, fewer in individual numbers per competitor, who all behaved in a relatively independent way and played with that advantage for enormous gain.

    Also, a good deal of my point is that the world is fuzzy. Saying “lone genius is dead” is just not true. You have to define a “lone genius” in a useful way, and my point is that once you’ve got practical distinguishing examples fitting the description, there’s nothing indicating that they’re on the decline. Saying they are dead borders on a theoretical religious belief, not a practical scientific one.

  7. bascha Says:

    You’re still dividing to conquer. You seem to think all ideas come from genius and are carried out by members of the ‘least common denominator pack.’ I say geniuses, too, are members of the pack. Genius is merely a state of mind, a fortunate and timely idea. Any moron can come up with something truly great–monkeys and typewriters, etc.

    Also, this is why we chose the more neutral stand-ins: hedgehogs and foxes. There’s no… elitest ring to it. Hedgehogs aren’t the source of all wisdom in the world. They’re simply single-minded pursuers of it. Foxes are just as likely to stumble upon it, in their wandering. It’s all about depth vs. breadth. Not who starts the fires.

    The question also wasn’t about who is necessary–every type is necessary. It’s more about what are we tending towards, and what role technology / communications / notions of copyright and fair use play in it.

  8. brian Says:

    I need to get that newfangled trackback thingermabob working.

    ok, true enough and I think we’re in vehement agreement on substantial parts about the application of the words “genius” and “pack” and “neccessity”.

    I think, and have actually thought for quite a while (meaning it’s possibly time for change), that the perception of empowerment^w societal privilege is a large part of what changes, and hence what can be openly displayed without controversy. Perhaps that’s an underlying current that affects things like fashion and politics; I’m a bit daft at spotting those trends easily, though. So, ahem,

    The internets are so competitive, and the skills required so conformist, that the truly stimulating mental experience for some folks is more rapidly becoming the way of the hedgehog. Hedgehogs are really feeling the crunch to get smarter, in the places where it affects daily life. Beyond that, I’m not going to bother commenting and just let the thread die (at least here).