Thu 30 May 2002 12:13
Mama Gena's School of Womanly Arts teaches New York women the art of pleasure. Getting it, not giving it.
http://www.nymag.com/page.cfm?page_id=4987
"My school is really about dipping your toe into the waters of womanhood; it's a courtesan academy. Selfishness is our ultimate goal, because what no one teaches us is that if you're not pleasuring yourself, you don't have the surplus to take care of anyone else. But if you learn how to take exquisite care of yourself, you're like, Give me your tired, your poor!"

Mama Gena explains that using the word vagina is not unlike calling your penis your prostate. "When women use the word pussy, it sets them free. They flush, they get all crazy. They feel all wild. It snaps a woman into her sassiness."

"I'm much more disciplined about my pleasure now," one graduate says. "If I haven't done something pleasurable for myself by the end of the day, I make sure I get it in. I think of it as like going to the gym."

--
Some sense please. I'm all fucked? up?

No I'm not.

"I know myself with myself, but I don't know myself with other people.

With you we can play in all ways.

Play

"Like a little kid.

The game.

posture.

1250
I did not do my two sun salutations/dancing/etc this morning.

I need a mission statement I need training. I need to know how to handle myself with other people. I _have_ lost it.

I need to lose it before I can find it...

I have to fuck up before I can get it right.

A bit sad.

Let's assume that I'm a leader. An incredible visionary leader.

Let's assume that people see me and they want to know who I am / what I am. Why I'm leaping and spinning. Why I'm being exuberant. Why I'm not letting them spout drivel (Howard), why...

Let's assume they think I have something special that they want.

So they talk with me. So they spend time with me. So they're curious about me. So they want to know what I do, what happened.

Other people have been that way to me to some degree (Bob).

Or I'm friendly, so they're friendly. Or I'm loving, and they want to love too? Or, I take risks and they're welcomed.

O.k. Stage is set....

Problem:
Tons of people to talk to / with/ spend time with.
In NYC, unless I actively hide out, actively be unfriendly (howard: it's so easy to be friendly), actively despise myself, life, etc. and become miserable, then that shall not change?

So what do I do with all these beautiful people.
They're not all women (anthony, peter.. howard)


am I an adult?
The money issue is still there?

so many people want a better way. Those with energy, with vitality have a better way--are the advertising that sells a question.

forget all that.

Just focus on your experience. Write the web site. Leave it at that.

Problem: too many beautiful loving people.

How does one adjust time with others/time with self.

Though it was incredibly disruptive (because) I am glad I gave yesterday to Joanna and to waiting for her in the park, and even to anne...

Yet, there's absolutely no sense!

Option 1:

No need to flip out... So you didn't get up as early as you wanted... So you didn't get to work on web site, or practice violin yesterday.

So your mind got stirred up about something probably not important and soon forgotten. Something you don't even know what it is. Perhaps you just wish you had a stirred up mind so-- you finally got it.

relax.

And my god. Sara showed up this morning. And anthony. And the morning before I missed Jenny Thompson, olympic fly gold-medalist?

And anthony is awesome. And sara was there to hug. And she kissed me as she left. Even though I had rambled away like the crazy person-

and not been with her?


and I remember how she feels. and..

There is so much I don't understand!!!!!!!


It is as if what I've wished for sometimes is happening. The simple storyline has a veneer of plausibility, of mundanity.

But beyond that it is all alichay in wonderland.

Yeah. There are the points that tie me down.

I should not be so crazy and irresponsible that I lose this job. I should not ...

I did something to my tooth and so should try to do something about it (cracked?) bringing back the difficulty of choosing dentists/doctors, insurance, responsible caring for self/ large amounts of money.

I'm becoming quiet now.

Assuming you're like a super-hero- physically perfect. Physically wonderful, invincible, perfect.

delirious.

Assuming you have a pussy which you can pay attention to, so that when it gets wet, you know you're on to something...

--

What a trip. Women have classes so they can have _Extended Massive Orgasm_ (Steve and Vera Bodansky), while-


A body of work.

Children's books.

energy which could be directed. instead of flailing.

El Enano SaltarÌn on his flying cuchara

Music you can trance with- play over and over- mood-- Anthony knew.

Project babylon. to replace an existing realtime english to many language translator...

_Coloring outside the lines_ Roger Schank 2000  A very nice book to read, along with Llewellen's books. Schank is an asshole, and he believes he should be, his kids should be, everyone should be. He's right. (The good kind: "excuse me, but _why_ must we put the seats in the upright position for landing and takeoff??")

attention, concentration

introducing sara

larry japanese bamboo flute

rbsp pool talent show/band.

in spite of the kurzweils, you're probably going to die.

It has been occurring to me to eventually take some time and focus on how to accumulate large amounts of money/ or why I instead shall not.

what might be acceptable.

shsarin very helpful (library) telling him so

What adult things might she like? While I like such juvenile.

"I've been doing the girlfriend thing." anthony

would she ever say, I want a man, not a 9 year old.

In some ways, already, I am more responsible than her- (health ins.)

?

do you remember what it's like to be a little kid, with her best friend? Do you want to be that way again?

I wasted someone else's at least half-hour-- a position of power for a foolish reason, the compulsion of money. I think it's foolish, but ultimately Hal believes there's some value in it (he gets to go to Glasgow?)

Tom Hanks- _big_

vitality

schank's intelligent people- seek out new and totally different restaurants (for example)

joanna, web page medium.

deepening of breathing, sleep-like, on back

ache in left wrist, from bending not right, typing.?

and they melted there, warm in eachother.

I love that sound of breathing.

the sd link to wired article on lowercase music.

me wanting to talk even while sara was kissing...

she waves vigorously bye as her subway leaves

joanna is looking at her cell phone

how you learn things from certain people, and when you use those things you remember the person. Jane DeLay's movement- shaking out-- back bend.. Joanna's, Thank you for last night.

Bob, man, I just met your old girlfriend on the subway. Freak of all freaks.Liz... Conde Nast building.

Catching the 3- I never. Last minute-- flood from one to three, finding a space. People clear out. Lights are dim, nice [cool [temp]]. I move in.

Yeah, another nice-looking woman. I don't want to be distracted by her, I close my eyes in a meditative way. And after a while, smile at the warm of the person (man or woman?) I'm back to back with. The part about my butt level is very warm. Earlier, just jumped on, standing with another nice woman, like those ads where the girl's against the wall with one leg up, her foot flat on the wall, and the guy has his arm, hand flat on the wall, by her shoulder, something like that [reminiscent of], and only because it's the subway, and she didn't seem to mind [I tried a less similar alternative due to that image coming to mind, but she didn't seem to like that as much, and it didn't work as well anyways], and I did the same with her, closing my eyes, in a meditative way.

Finally, I open to look at her more, and,
"Excuse me--Do you know bob hugel?"

"what?" (what did she say)

"do you...

She jumps up and hugs me. I can't do much more than move my upper body down and forward, because I have a violin, library books...

"I thought you looked familiar-- I thought you were my guitar teacher..


and so on. Sailing on tuesdays-- battery park city marina.

Her number, with any luck I wrote it down write (right), she was watching with an eagle eye to make sure, and made sure I had her last name too-

and - the best part- I hug her before she heads off, with arms this time!

No more walking off without hugs--

I did have the impulse [make the motion] with Jen Mondino, but no reflection- though she did say [earlier], "send me an email"


Jen mondino email subjetted (only just before now): "This city is unreal."

and I told joanna, just walking around, there's so many friends to be had, you know you could walk up to one of many of these many, and have a friend.

She's leaving in two weeks.

We read-- El Enano..


What does it take to even contemplate a vision like that?


and I won't actually send jen an email?

spinning on the grass by imagine. Handstands. spinning on grass works well.

Now I am those dancers, young ballet dancers, at barton springs pool doing a leap turn while running up the grassy slope, that I teared to have seen, that day, eons ago, before.

Anne has 8 cats. Telling her about rotten.com (the worst of the cat stories), and giving her the millions and millions of cats kids book to read. I say things to her when others are there, I would not say if it were just us two... I noted that before. Still fascinating.

2 more than I thought she had.

1501
already??

preserving this and work on site in event of nyc destruction? and so on?

only in at most three places at once, almost always in Manhattan.
Trip to dc?


Anthony was reading _drama of the gifted child_--says it was a mind-blowing book... but psychoanalysis type? would it blow mine? should try.

balance as meditation, as sacred as spiritual as total focus- The moments of perfect handstand, extended foot balance.


o.k., I'm now outside myself and looking at the texture, varigieted bumps, on the wall.


depression... Where are you?...  A bit on Tuesday am, but gone by end of swim.


o carfree-wg emails to peter.

sara didn't practice the past two days either. what did she do?

telling her about my match.com profile. meeting the manic depressive. who stayed home and wrote a screenplay rather than going to a movie.

the man with 1000s of skin tumors. barely human looking, but still living.

1542
scans of a picture of me with two mexican kids
myself and pilar (hanging clothes).

lost-- though I remember them well. My anti picture orientation has now made those valuable, but now, and because.

scanned in BW-- the pilar original color, though liana foxvog shot me & kids in BW then mailed me the picture as postcard.

1614
I've got the pilar picture back from an old email--
1640
Now that I think of it, I may not have ever scanned in liana's picture. maybe it is still in italy, if it is there. not a big issue. and I found two of my old personal ads (pre-dance era).

perhaps now, work.

1656
The emails will have to eventually be added.

(cleath@tjhsst.vak12ed.edu)

from groups.google found one from before maui stating my dream...
My alt.good.morning posts from 1995 aren't there (but might someday be--though I think I like them not being there).

1733

enough blast from the past?

(I wrote every friday my first month or so at UW, long emails, but those are gone)

Once I get those old (primarily with Rebecca) emails up, I may be amazed to
see just how much I repeat myself (senility). Repeat discovering the same things?

Roger Schank on remembering- having recall of past experience and being able to make comparisons. basis for intelligence.

1839 catching with Kurzweilai.net news

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.06/wolfram.html
"He dropped totally out of the scene in every sense of the word," says his friend Terrence Sejnowski, a neuroscientist at the Salk Institute. "He hasn't published a word, he doesn't go to meetings. He's in a self-made isolation center." To maximize his concentration, Wolfram became nocturnal: He worked at night, when the world was asleep, and retired at 8 in the morning.

Wolfram's days would begin in mid-afternoon. He'd usually do an hour or two of official business, operating a multimillion-dollar company by email and conference call. Early evening hours offered an opportunity for some family time. Then, as the world retired and distractions fell away, he'd enter the professionally soundproofed, wood-lined office on the top floor of his house and immerse himself in the act of remaking science.


He spent hours running thousands of computer simulations and noting the results. Because part of his project involved nailing down the conceptual history of dozens of scientific branches, he'd surf the Web. "One can devour lots of papers in very short amounts of time in the middle of the night," he would later explain to me. He'd begin with an idea, and start downloading papers. Eventually, "you feel kind of depressed that it's too big a field and you're never going to understand it." But then, "usually in a few days it all starts to kind of crystallize and you realize that there really are only three ideas in this field, and two of them you don't believe. And sometimes at that stage, when I'm checking that I've really got all of the ideas, I find it useful to chat with people. Sometimes you hear about something else. And sometimes you don't."

Wolfram's friends came to know the drill. "You get a call at 2 in the morning," says Sejnowski. "By the morning he knows more than you do." Every two weeks or so, Wolfram would call an outside expert, but usually found these sessions unsatisfying. All too often he'd be disappointed that the alleged master couldn't provide him with the information he needed.

On a good night, he'd get a page written,

At 12, he won a scholarship to Eton, where he astonished teachers with his brilliance and frustrated them by taking no instruction whatsoever. He made money by doing other kids' math homework. At 14, he became interested in a particle physics problem and wound up writing a paper that was accepted by a prestigious professional journal. He entered Oxford at age 17, but it is an exaggeration to say he attended it - by his account, he went to first-year lectures on his first day and found them "awful." The next two days he dropped in on second- and then third-year lectures, quickly deciding "it was all too horrible - I wasn't going to go to any more lectures." So he worked independently, making no secret of his disdain for the professors he considered his intellectual inferiors. When he took end-of-year exams, he finished at the top of his class.

1902
from looking up _Drama of the Gifted Child_
http://www.omnimag.com/archives/interviews/miller.html
The way we were treated as small children is the way we treat ourselves the rest of our lives: with cruelty or with tenderness and protection. We often impose our most agonizing suffering upon ourselves and, later, on our children.

Miller uses the phrase poisonous pedagogy to describe what we inflict on children "for their own good" out of our hypocrisy and ignorance. She perceives that we instill humiliation, shame. fear, and guilt as we are "training" children. By encouraging conformity, suppressing curiosity and emotions, a parent reduces a child's ability to make crucial perceptions in later life. "Children are tolerant. They learn intolerance from us."

(Howard's words from yesterday)

"Five years after I began painting spontaneously, I started writing books. This never would have been possible without the inner liberation painting has given me. The more freedom I got playing with colors, the more I had to question what I had learned twenty years ago.

"I have come to realize that hostility toward children is to be found in countless forms, not only in death camps but throughout all levels of society and in every intellectual discipline -- even in most schools of therapy."

Anthropologist Ashley Montagu stated that _Thou Shalt Not Be Aware_ "will undoubtedly prove to be a watershed in the history of psychoanalysis."


Now I see that each philosopher had to build a big, big building in order not to feel his pain. Even Freud.


I want to inform people that there is no one person in the whole world who abuses children without having been abused as a child.

 Montagu sent me his book Growing Young,

They learned thirty years ago that it is necessary for the baby to scream and be spanked


In The Drama you connect repressed feeling with loss of vitality. Was that your experience here?

Miller

Yes, experiencing the pain of my life gave me back my vitality. First pain, then vitality. The price of repressing feelings is depression. I also had to resist the usual way of learning. If you are forced to do something, you cannot have fun


But for me, having fun is the first condition of creativity. I learned when I played with color. But I resisted learning about color by reading theories from books. For me painting, dreaming, and writing have something in common. I paint as I dream. I have many impulses and associations. I never have a plan, a concept of what I want to do. I do have a concept sometimes, but I cannot realize it because while painting, I start to dream of something else and I forget my plan. In the beginning I had a sort of narrative style. I wanted to tell a story, or a story in myself wanted to be told. Now it's more like needing this color, this form, this line. It's improvisation. I'd say I am painting like a jazz musician.

~I don't want to make a masterpiece, or even good pictures. Fortunately, I don't need to sell my paintings. I'm only compelled to work further and further into what is true. Sometimes I destroy my paintings. I change and change them, even though they may have been nicer before. In the end I'm happy because it's what I wanted to say. I don't care if someone says it's good or not. In painting I feel absolutely free. I have my palette, my white paper; and nobody can tell me what is right or wrong.



You admire Goya and Turner?

Miller

They are not models for me but are examples of true and great artists. Both were successful and admired. Then suddenly they absolutely changed their styles.

to be good, skillful, admired, famous, and then to abandon all this to go your own way

I wrote essays on Nietzsche, Picasso, [German expressionist] Kathe Kollwitz after I discovered facts from their childhoods that cast new light on their works. It is amazing that the importance of these facts was overlooked. The essays are still unpublished because I haven't had the time to put them in a new book. And I'm tired of publishing books. I love to write but not to publish. It takes so much time and is not really creative.


Usually I take new manuscripts home with me at lunchtime. This time I couldn't take my nap; I had to finish it. I didn't return to work that day, either. You made a big discovery."

Hitler had no witness. His father destroyed everything his son did. He could never tell anyone the pains he was suffering.

Despite variations in cultures, abuse is found in almost every one. But there are some that are different. For instance, there are people on an island of Malaysia called Senoi who have a nonviolent culture. They talk with their children about dreams each morning. They never have had war. Our culture is so violent because as children we learned not to feel.

One can find plenty of irresponsible and harmful techniques and mixtures of techniques that don'~t provide a systematic confrontation with the past.

First try to discover your own childhood, then take the experience seriously. Listen to the patient and not to any theory; with your theory you are not free to listen. Forget it. Do not analyze the patient like an object. Try to feel, and help the patient to feel instead of talking to the patient about the feelings of others.


Children who have really been loved and protected will not be interested in these films and shows and will not be in danger. But the child who was hurt and humiliated -- maybe at school, not necessarily by his parents -- is looking for outcomes, for material; he is looking for an object to hate and on whom to take revenge. Of course there are people who make a business of the suffering of children. But the violence doesn't come from TV films. Its sources are deeper. Protected and loved children cannot become murderers. It is impossible to find one person who was not beaten who beats a child.

He thanked me because he felt supported by my books. This shows one person can make people aware that methods they never questioned before are, in fact, damaging. The single advocate of a child can save a life; advocates say a crime is a crime; they don't conceal the truth by calling it ambivalent parent's love.


A child can avoid becoming a criminal if he has the chance in childhood to meet at least one person who is not cruel to him, who maybe even likes him or understands him. The experience of love, compassion, or sympathy would help him to recognize cruelty for what it is.


http://www.naturalchild.com/alice_miller/booklist.html
Alice Miller shows us people who have suffered great loneliness in childhood and who now, in adulthood, despite their yearnings for contact and communication, are still trapped in inner isolation. But encounters with others who had the good fortune to grow up in loving families open them to new worlds in which they too can learn to change.

As we watch, some manage to speak the truth, to free themselves of old fears and defensive myths, to trust. The luckiest come to love and be loved-by partners, friends, and their own children, whom they can then free from the curse of having to relive their parents' inner traumas.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0465016901/qid=1022802228/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_1/102-0757375-8624164 earl halzell's review
This is one of those books that are not for the faint of heart. So many books in the world that people think are incendiary or revolutionary, challenging and rechallenging our conception of free speech, religion, citizenship, science and technology, philosophy, economics and politics or spirituality have an attraction to us because of how they serve as metaphors for the painful realities of our personal lives under the illusions we create for public consumption, and the secrets of our inner selves we wish to uncover. We yearn to break free of something and embrace some inner truth; we just don't know what, and therefore call it some aspect of the outer world. The desires we have to be and have more than what we are, the feelings of not knowing who we truly are and never truly being loved--and the root causes of such feelings--are unveiled in this powerful, disturbing, life shifting and life-affirming book.


Nonetheless, taking our culture's preoccupation with the self into consideration, there is still nothing of lasting value one could do in the world without at least endeavoring to answer the existential questions of soul, love, freedom, loss and pain- and the true self- that this book demands you to do in a new way for practically the rest of your life.

from Peter Kindle's review:
Be that as it may, virtually every first-born baby boomer can profit from this book! Our fathers were largely absent. Our mothers were forced into social straightjackets that stunted their humanity. The false selves this environment produced has left a legacy of emotional pain that continues to fuel the therapy industry.

more reviews:
The shortest and best book I've read on the subject of childhood trauma. This book is controversial because it is terrifying to admit that love can be lied about. If you prefer to mask raw emotion and grief with intellectual diversions or chemicals, this book is not for you.


 Outdated and irrelevant, June 24, 2001


Reviewer: A reader from Bellevue, WA USA
I was very disappointed with this work. If you still subscribe to Freud's outdated theories, then this may be for you. Otherwise, you're better off reading works by newer researchers in the area of psychiatry/psychology. Im particular, I tend to respect those who combine elements of the social, biological, learned behaviour, and psychoanalytic theories in their works.

This book does little more than blame one's mother for the gamut of problems a human being goes through during life. This seems to me to be a highly narrow-minded and ill-informed approach. The human psyche is a complex phenomemon that cannot be explained with a single simplistic theory contained in a 150-page book.

 


 Read Winnicott Instead, May 14, 2001


Reviewer: Jay Swanson (see more about me) from New York, NY USA
This book changed my life - by leading me to the works of D.W. Winnicott, to whom Miller refers here and there. If two stars seem like a stingy payback for a life-changing experience, the reason is that when I read Winnicott I discovered that he had said everything that Miller says, with far greater eloquence and, yes, originality. Go to the source: read Winnicott instead.


back to wolfram:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.06/wolfram.html?pg=4&topic=&topic_set=
Eventually, after publishing 10 papers, he left Oxford for Caltech, which presented him with a PhD in theoretical physics just weeks after he turned 20 and hired him as a faculty member alongside luminaries like Richard Feynman and Murray Gell-Mann. A year later, he won the MacArthur award. He considered the surrounding hubbub an annoyance, and during a network TV interview he conspicuously picked his nose.

2013
Wolfram's cellular-automata work came to be cited in more than 10,000 papers. He felt, however, that even his enthusiasts were missing the point - that CAs held the key to a vast understanding of the world. Aware that the Institute for Advanced Study was not eager to host his explorations, he left for the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, which gave him his own institute, the Center for Complex Systems Research. But after two years, he left the center - among his many complaints, he says, "the goofiest thing was that I was supposed to be the guy who went out to raise money, while other people got to do science." By then, he had seemingly been diverted by another project - creating a computer language called Mathematica, which took his SMP work at Caltech to a much higher level. He started Wolfram Research and hired top scientists and mathematicians to staff its Champaign headquarters. The software came out in 1988 and was an instant success. By 1995, more than a million people were using it.

 there was no problem spending millions of dollars on a personal science project.


Suddenly, it occurs to me that someone might be missing in this group. "Who actually edited the book?" I ask. There is a puzzled silence in the room. An editor? Finally Wolfram says, "No one." Except, of course, the author. Later on, he explains. "I think in terms of 'This is my book and I'm fully responsible for it.'"

The Wolfram worldview focuses on simple rules that generate counterintuitively complex results

After a while I realized, 'Why am I really doing this? Is it really worth my while to spend 10 years of my life doing something to get other people to say positive things about it?' No, it's not. Absolutely not. And actually, from some very cynical point of view, my opinion of the world at large isn't high enough for me really to be interested in what they have to say."

He's absolutely confident that his work is sound and is ready to let people absorb it over a period of decades.

Like James Joyce, Wolfram believes his ideal reader  is one who will devote a lifetime to reading his book, and like Joyce the novelist, Stephen Wolfram (a novelist's son) has produced an encyclopedic world.

And in another irony not lost on the author, Wolfram's research led him to a textbook on logic written by his mother. "I actually cared about the answers to the questions," he says.

 Not only does a single measly rule account for everything, but if one day we actually see the rule, he predicts, we'll probably find it unimpressive. "One might expect," he writes, "that in the end there would be nothing special about the rule for our universe - just as there has turned out to be nothing special about our position in the solar system or the galaxy."


But we're not looking at 25,000 lines of code or something. We're looking at a handful of lines of code."

"So it's not like Windows?"

"No." Wolfram laughs. "It's not like Windows.


There is a moment of silence between us. In the background are the clatter of dishes and silverware, noises that come from a restaurant in Urbana, Illinois, preparing for closing time. The mundane but complex stuff of equivalent computational processes.

"Well," I say finally, "I guess we'd feel really bad if it wasn't well-written."

Wolfram grins. "Yes, right."


Contributing writer Steven Levy (steven@echonyc.com) is a senior editor at Newsweek and the author of Crypto.

very nice, Steven Levy.



http://www.reason.com/rb/rb050102.shtml
"I donít think that the purpose of human life is just to feel good," Kurzweil responded. "Creating knowledge, appreciating a jazz riff, a good conversation -- they are really the most profound and satisfactory experiences. It really comes down to, what is the purpose of life? Is it to create knowledge and new patterns of information?"

Stock wondered, "What is the purpose of life when nonbiological intelligences of the sort youíre talking about are more creative than we are?" Kurzweil answered, "As we become more intimate with our machines, biology does become trivial. The nonbiological part will accelerate and become a million trillion times more powerful than biology. Because it is the nature of the nonbiological intelligence to grow exponentially, it will eventually dominate. This whole period of transhumanism is just an interim period." Although humans as such may disappear in the nanotechnological future, that which will endure beyond our biology will be an expression of our civilization, Kurzweil asserted.


http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2002/04/rauch.htm
In the 1960s he grew interested in segregated neighborhoods. It was easy in America, he noticed, to find neighborhoods that were mostly or entirely black or white, and correspondingly difficult to find neighborhoods where neither race made up more than, say, three fourths of the total. "The distribution," he wrote in 1971, "is so U-shaped that it is virtually a choice of two extremes." That might, of course, have been a result of widespread racism, but Schelling suspected otherwise. "I had an intuition," he told me, "that you could get a lot more segregation than would be expected if you put people together and just let them interact."

The realization that their individual preferences lead to a collective outcome indistinguishable from thoroughgoing racism might surprise them no less than it surprised me and, many years ago, Thomas Schelling.

Nonetheless, Epstein never managed to finish high school. Instead he got into college on a piano audition and, after composing a series of chamber- music pieces, ended up switching to the study of mathematics and political economy. That led to a Ph.D. in political science in 1981 and then a position at Brookings, plus the realization that he was fascinated by mathematical models.

There followed the inevitable napkin moment, when the two of them sat in the cafeteria and sketched out a simple artificial world in which little hunter- gatherer creatures would move around a landscape finding, storing, and consuming the only resource, sugar. When they brought Sugarscape, as they called it, to life with the computer, they were startled to see that almost immediately their rudimentary A-society produced a skewed distribution of sugar that looked very much like the skewed distribution of wealth in human societies, even though nothing about the agents' simple behavioral rules pointed to any such outcome. For several years they built up and elaborated Sugarscape, and discovered that simple rules could produce complex social phenomena that mimicked migrations, epidemics, trade. "Every time we build one of these things, it does some shocking thing," Epstein told me. "You can make it as simple as you want, and it will do something surprising, almost certainly."


Epstein and Axtell then began applying their technique, which they called agent- based modeling, to a variety of problems and questions, and as they did so they quietly inverted a number of tenets of the more conventional varieties of social modeling. In Sugarscape, and in the other artificial societies that followed, Epstein and Axtell made their agents heterogeneous. That is, the artificial people, like real people, were different from one another.



Ross Hammond brought home to me what I had been missing.

When I met him, last year, he worked as an assistant to Epstein and Axtell (he has since moved on to graduate school at the University of Michigan), but he originally devised his world in 1999, for a senior thesis at Williams College. He decided to make an abstract model of social corruption

Every so often, in the course of random events, a particularly large number of corrupt agents, who happen to have particularly large networks of friends who perhaps themselves have large social networks, will be arrested. That, Hammond figures, has a doublebarreled effect: it leads a lot of agents to notice that many of their friends are under arrest, and it also increases the likelihood that they will encounter an honest agent in the next transaction. Fearing that they will meet their friends' fate, the agents behave more honestly; and in doing so they heighten yet further the odds that a corrupt agent will be nailed, inspiring still more caution about corruption. Soonóin fact, almost instantlyóso many agents are behaving honestly that corruption ceases to pay, and everyone turns honest.


"There are plenty of different cities and countries that have gone from a high degree of corruption to a low degree of corruption," Hammond says. His A- society suggests that in such a transition, the fear of being caught may be at least as important as the odds of actually being caught. To test that possibility, Hammond re-ran his simulation, but this time he allowed all the agents to know not just how many of their friends were in jail but how many people were jailed throughout the whole society: in other words, the agents knew the odds of arrest as well as the police did. Sure enough, fully informed agents never got scared enough to reform. Hammond's A-society seemed to have "grown" a piece of knowledge that many law-enforcement agencies (think of the Internal Revenue Service, with its targeted, high-profile audits) have long intuitedónamely, that limited resources are often more effectively spent on fearsome, and fearsomely unpredictable, high-profile sweeps than on uniform and thus easily second- guessed patterns of enforcement.


Hammond also wondered what would happen if he made all the agents alike, instead of giving each a personality marked by a randomly varied proclivity to cheat. What if, say, all agents preferred honesty exactly half the time? The answer was that the A-society never made a transition; it stayed corrupt forever, because everyone "knew" how everyone else would behave. A social model that viewed individuals as multiple copies of the same fully informed person could thus never "see" the social transformation that Hammond found, for the simple reason that without diversity and limited knowledge, the transformation never happens. Given that human beings are invariably diverse and that the knowledge at their disposal is invariably limited, it would seem to follow that even societies in which unsophisticated people obey rudimentary rules will produce surprises and discontinuitiesóevents that cannot be foreseen either through intuition or through the more conventional sorts of social science.


The resulting universe of A-firms, Axtell found, is like the sand pile, full of avalanches small and large as firms form, prosper, grow lazy, lose talent to hungrier firms, and then shrink or collapse. As in real life, a few A-firms live and thrive for generations, but most are evanescent, and now and then a really big one collapses despite having been stable for years.

"I looked at Rob's model and it dawned on me. This creates the city system." The artificial cities and their artificial residents were all unknowingly locked in a competition for talent, but they could retain only so much of it before they lost ground relative to other clusters of talent.


what is striking in all these cases is the abruptness with which seemingly law-abiding and peaceable people turned into looters or killers.


I don't think I'm alone in finding this artificial genocide eerie. The outcome, of course, is chilling; but what is at least as spooky is that such complicatedóto say nothing of familiarósocial patterns can be produced by mindless packets of data following a few almost ridiculously simple rules.

Neither she nor anyone else, Epstein included, believes that an array of little dots explains the Rwandan cataclysm or any other real- world event; the very notion is silly. What the simulation did suggest to Des Forges is that disparate social breakdowns, in widely separated parts of the world, may have common dynamicsólinking Rwanda, for instance, to other horrors far away. She also told me that Epstein's demonstration reminded her of Hutu killers' attack on Tutsis who had gathered on a Rwandan hilltop: the torches, the fires, the killing working its way up the hill.


We said, Okay, that's what really happened. Let's try to grow that in an agent-based model. Let's create little cyber-Anasazi and see if we can equip them with rules for farming, moving, mating, under which you just leave them alone with the environment changing as it truly did, and see if they reproduceó growóthe true, observed history."


"It boggles the mind. More than half the simulations produce the biggest site right hereówhere the biggest site actually was."

If even the crudest toy societies take on a life and a logic of their own, then it must be a safe bet that real societies, too, have their own biographies. Intuition tells us that it is meaningful to speak of Society as something greater than and distinct from the sum of individuals and families, just as it is meaningful to speak of the mind as something greater than and distinct from the sum of brain cells. Intuition appears to be correct.


Why did the homicide rate in New York City, after more than a century of relative stability at a remarkably low level, quadruple after 1960? Why did the rate of violent crime in America as a whole triple from 1965 to 1980? Why did the percentage of children born out of wedlock quadruple from 1965 to 1990? Why did crack use explode in the 1980s and then collapse in the 1990s? If we think of societies in terms of straight lines and smooth curves, such landslides and reversals seem mystifying, bizarre; if we think in terms of sand piles and teeming cyber-agents, it seems surprising if avalanches do not happen.


Washington, D.C., is a place deeply committed to linearity. Want to cut crime in half? Then double the number of cops or the length of prison sentences. That is how both Washington and the human brain are wired to think. Yet in recent years many people even in Washington have come to understand that something is amiss with straight-line or smooth- curve thinking. In fact, the notion of unintended consequences has become almost a clichÈ. Policy measures sometimes work more or less as expected, but often they misfire, or backfire. So far the trouble has been that the idea of unintended consequences, important and well founded though it may be, is an intellectual dead end. Just what is one supposed to do about it? One cannot very well never do anything (which, in any case, would have unintended consequences of its own), and one also cannot foresee the unforeseeable. And so Washington shuffles along neurotically in a state of befuddled enlightenment, well aware of the law of unintended consequences but helpless to cope with it.


It is at least possible that with the development of artificial societies, we have an inkling of an instrument that can peer into the black box of unintended consequences. That is not to say that A- societies will ever predict exact events and detailed outcomes in real societies; on the contrary, a fundamental lesson of A-societies seems to be that the only way to forecast the future is to live it. However, A-societies may at least suggest the kinds of surprises that could pop up. We won't know when we will be blindsided, but we may well learn which direction we are most likely to be hit from.


Moreover, A-societies may also eventually suggest where to look for the sorts of small interventions that can have large, discontinuous consequences. "It may be that you could learn of minimally costly interventions that will give you a more satisfactory outcome," Thomas Schelling told meóinterventions not unlike his trick of reordering the traffic flow in Harvard's stairwells by changing the behavior of a single class. I used to think that the notion of government funding for late-night basketball was silly, or at best symbolic. In fact it may be exactly the right approach, because pulling a few influential boys off the streets and out of trouble might halt a chain reaction among their impressionable peers.


It now seems to me that programs like President Clinton's effort to hire 100,000 additional police officers and spread them in a uniform film across every jurisdiction are the gestural, brain-dead ones, because they ignore the world's lumpiness. Increasingly, cops themselves are coming to the same conclusion. More than a few cities have learned (or relearned) that pre- emptively concentrating their efforts on key areas and offenders can dramatically reduce crime across an entire city at comparatively little cost.

Epstein concludes that simply throwing forces at an ethnic conflict is no answer; intervention needs to anticipate trouble.

The science of artificial societies is in its infancy. Whether toy genocides will truly be relevant to real ones remains an open question. But the field is burgeoning, and a lot is going on, some of which will bear fruit. Researchers are creating cyber- models of ancient Indians of Colorado's Mesa Verde and Mexico's Oaxaca Valley; they are creating virtual Polynesian societies and digital mesolithic foragers; they are growing crime waves in artificial neighborhoods, price shocks in artificial financial markets, sudden changes in retirement trends among artificial Social Security recipients, and epidemics caused by bioterrorism. At least two sets of researchers are growing artificial polities in which stable political parties emerge spontaneously (conventional political science has never satisfactorily explained why political parties appear to be a feature of every democracy).


Today's universities and think tanks are full of analysts who use multivariate equations to model the effects of changes in tax rates or welfare rules or gun laws or farm subsidies; I can easily envision a time, not long from now, when many of those same analysts will test policy changes not on paper but on artificial Americas that live and grow within computers all over the country, like so many bacterial cultures or fruit-fly populations. The rise and refinement of artificial societies is not going to be a magic mirror, but it promises some hope of seeing, however dimly, around the next corner.


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