The swamp and the swamp monster: On seeing like a data structure

As human knowledge fragments into trillions of data-points hidden in unreadable databases, there’s a sense of something — legibility, coherence, correlation — dissolving or liquefying. In a very interesting article, Fear of oozification, the consultant Venkatesh Rao, clarifies this process by naming it, and he charts a path to help us learn “how to stop worrying, and learn to love the ooze”. Oozification? What are you talking about? Well, here’s Venkatash’s working definition: “Oozification is the process of recursively replacing systems based on numerous larger building blocks, governed by many rules, with ones based on fewer, smaller building blocks, governed by fewer rules, thereby increasing the number of evolutionary possibilities and lowering the number of evolutionary certainties.” Oozification is an evocative but perhaps clumsy term. If you don’t like it, you can look at it another way: the triumph of data abstraction and indirection. The authors of another worthwhile article,…

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