thoughts on mapping

Imagine an alien, Fox once said, who's come here to identify the
planet's dominant form of intelligence. The alien has a look, then chooses.
What do you think he picks? I probably shrugged. The zaibatsus, Fox said,
the multinationals. The blood of a zaibatsu is information, not people. The
structure is independent of the individual lives that comprise it.
Corporation as life form. Not the Edge lecture again, I said
- From William Gibson's "New Rose Hotel"

If we were to represent a Corporation, computer program, or network graphically, the most most common way is to depict its blood: the individual nodes that comprise it, the connections, and the information flowing through it. Like an x-ray or CAT scan of the organism, this method depicts the internal structures accurately. However, how do you depict the movement of this organism?

The first step would be to define the space it inhabits. We define our dimensions as degrees of movement, which also happens to be all that is needed to acurately describe our unique position. True, non-organic life exists in the same 4 (3 spacial, 1 temporal) dimensions as us, though these values have little meaning to it since its degree of movement are different. To show it moving would be to show the changes in each of its degrees of freedom: the number of nodes, the number of connection, information flow, influence, etc.

The video video above was created charting random data, but could be applied to any number of non-organic organisms.

Mon, Jan 28, 2008  Permanent link