"This
Snow Crash, what is it? A drug, virus, or religion?"
"What's
the difference?"
-
Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash
Field Research
Among the Hacker Tribes
If Margaret
Mead broke the anthropological canon when she went to live among
the Samoans, it must also be said that she learned more about
their culture than any researcher had before. Objectivity, which
confers a special joisannce upon sociological and anthropological
research, exists essentially as a left-over nineteenth century
fraud of scientism, a myth that bolstered the believability of
facts which can not easily be verified.
This paper,
which covers a twenty-year span of the culture of "hackers" -
in the original meaning of the word, those in love with code and
the culture which nurtures this love - involves an act of internal
observation. The author, who grew up in the confines of this culture,
finds himself forced to report from within the culture this paper
attempts to describe, and is therefore necessarily subjective,
situated within the land as it draws the arc of its landscape.
In 1978,
the author acquired a first-generation personal computer (a Tandy
TRS-80) and began to learn how to program it, inadvertently entering
a subculture still nascent, mostly confined to the university
computing centers around major technical institutions such as
MIT and the University of California (Levy, 1984). As this culture
grew from a marginalized clique of "geeks" into the white-hot
focal point of American culture and commerce (TIME 27 September
1999), it has become increasingly important to understand that
this sub-culture has its roots in the entirely imaginary realm,
that of "hard" science fiction.
Unlike the
fantasy worlds of "soft" science fiction, "hard" science fiction
builds upon physically realistic premises to construct worlds
where the "what if" element very nearly touches the bounds of
the technically possible. The fringed edge between the actual
and the possible - constantly evolving in a series of non-linear
inflations (McKenna, 1975) - marks the boundary of innovation,
the border between ideas and their realizations. In the case of
computer software, which is itself the logical structuring of
codes to produce a platform for the expression of ideas, the boundary
between idea and realization becomes entirely permeable, an osmotic
flow of memes (Dawkins, 1990), which, insofar as they can infect
the hacker mind, engender the design of new software systems.
It is the
thesis of this paper that, for the last twenty years at least,
"hard" science fiction has functioned as a "high level architecture"
(HLA), an evolving design document for a generation of software
designers brought up in hacker culture, a culture which prizes
these works as foundational elements in their own worldviews.
Hackers, energized by texts which foresaw their own emerging role
in planetary culture, have come to see their "mission" as the
realization of the visions brought forth from authors like Vernor
Vinge, Orson Scott Card, William Gibson, Neal Stephenson and Greg
Egan.
A historical
analysis of the last twenty years of "important" science fiction
- texts which have had a pivotal impact on the hacking community
- clearly shows the relationship between these texts and the grand
projects of hackers. The author considers his own career in software
development - heavily influenced by Gibson and Stephenson - as
typical within hacker culture, so this paper will discuss some
of the autobiographical aspects of the author's career as a case-in-point,
bringing particular focus to the generalities under discussion.
Part
One: Before Gibson (1950 - 1981)
During a
1980 lecture at MIT's Kresge Auditorium, renowned science fiction
author Isaac Azimov announced that he had invented the electronic
calculator - back in 1950. He pointed to the opening chapters
of his epochal (and influential) Foundation trilogy, in
which Hari Seldon, puppet master of the epic, demonstrates a mathematical
theorem on a device which displayed its results in "red digits,
floating in space" (Azimov, 1950), an eerily accurate reference
to the then-popular LED displays used in pocket calculators. While
said in jest, Azimov clearly felt some sense of ownership in the
age of growing high-tech gadgetry, an age he had described countless
times in his books.
A generation
raised on Azimov's tales created the technological world of the
late 20th century, translating his ideas - in particular,
the artificial intelligences explored in his Robot series of novels
- into real-world artifacts. Speaking to Stewart Brand in 1986,
Artificial Intelligence pioneer and avid science fiction reader
Marvin Minsky pronounced that his own guiding light came from
the pages Azimov's works:
"Well, I
think of them as thinkers. They try to figure out the consequences
and implications of things in as thoughtful a way as possible.
A couple of hundred years from now, maybe Isaac Azimov and Fred
Pohl will be considered the most important philosophers of the
twentieth century, and the professional philosophers will almost
all be forgotten, because they're just shallow and wrong, and
they're ideas aren't very powerful.
"When Pohl
or Azimov writes something, I regard it as extremely urgent to
read it right away. They might have a new idea. Azimov has been
working for forty years on this problem: if you can make an intelligent
machine, what kind of relations will it have with people? How
do you negotiate when their thinking is so different? The science
fiction writers think about what it means to think."
Minsky, as
the prototypical hacker, expresses the essence of the hacker's
relationship to the science fiction text, seeing it as the theoretical
ground for a kind of natural philosophy that he then tests and
actualizes in his own research. Science fiction provides him -
and by extension, all hackerdom - a field of ideas to play within,
and select from.
The roots
of the modern movement of "cyberpunk" fiction can be traced back
to the enormously influential writer John Brunner. In a series
of dazzling novels written throughout the 1970's, Brunner redefined
the field of science fiction, and clearing the way for authors
like William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, established the dystopian
world view as the weltanschauung of choice in hard science
fiction.
One of Brunner's
novels has had an impact far beyond science fiction; in Shockwave
Rider (Brunner, 1975), computer and network sabotage are described
in terms that would be familiar today, with worms and viruses
snaking their way across the physical and cultural structures
of the world, unleashed by a protagonist interested in setting
society to rights. As a text, Shockwave Rider represents
the introduction of the hacker hero, and this myth likely produced
an auto-catalytic recognition and formation of community among
the still widely scattered hacker cliques of the late 1970s. Recognizing
their own impending empowerment in the pages of Shockwave Rider,
hackers began to identify with the goals and methodologies expressed
by Brunner, and communities of common interest naturally formed.
The next
text of major significance to hacker culture presented a unique,
integrated vision of a future both trans-human (in the sense that
a transcendence out of human form is expressed in the narrative)
and remarkably realistic, bridging the two in a classical story
of suspense. Vernor Vinge's novella True Names (1980) brought
apotheosis to the heart of hacker culture:
He looked
around, feeling suddenly like a small boy let loose in a candy
shop: he sensed enormous data bases and the power that would let
him use them...In seconds, they were the biggest users in North
America. The drain would be clear to anyone monitoring the System,
though a casual user might notice only increased delays in turnaround.
--but they
were experiencing what no human had ever known before, a sensory
bandwidth thousands of times normal. For seconds that seemed without
end, their minds were filled with a jumble verging on pain, data
that was not information and information that was not knowledge.
To hear ten million simultaneous phone conversations, to see the
continent's entire video output, should have been a white noise.
Instead it was a tidal wave of detail rammed through the tiny
aperture of their minds.
He controlled
more than raw data now; if he could master them, the continent's
computers could process this avalanche, much the way parts of
the human brain preprocess their input. More seconds passed, but
now with a sense of time, as he struggled to distribute his very
consciousness through the System.
Then it was
over, and he had control once more. But things would never be
the same: the human that had been Mr. Slippery was an insect wandering
in the cathedral his mind had become. There simply was more there
than before. No sparrow could fall without his knowledge, via
air traffic control; no check could be cashed without his noticing
over the bank communication net. More than three hundred million
lives swept before what his senses had become.
As Roger
Pollack, the protagonist in True Names, extends his consciousness
through the planet-spanning networks of the early 21st
century, he finds himself transformed into an Übermensch,
as far removed from the pedestrian concerns of humanity as we
are above the fruit fly. Vinge brought the still-nascent networks
of the 1970s inside the skin, and in so doing, delivered
a radical new vision to hacker culture. Confusing the boundaries
between the machinic and the biological without resorting to the
simplicities of the cyborg, offering a new mythology of evolution
and transcendence, Vinge infected the hacker community with a
new religion, both personal and realizable. Setting the stage
for the grand architecture of both virtual reality and the World
Wide Web, inspiring those charged with creating these artifacts
with a teleology, an expression of the human destiny within them.
In Stuart Brand's The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT
(1987), he recognized True Names - with an afterward by
Marvin Minsky - as among the most popular books for sale at MIT's
bookstore, a text reaching hacker culture at its mainspring, and
during its most formative years.
The third
text which significantly radicalized hackers before the emergence
of the cyberpunk movement must undoubtedly be Orson Scott Card's
novel Enders' Game (1982). At one level, Ender's Game
is the coming-of-age story of Andrew "Ender" Wiggin, the biological
end-product of a fascist government program to produce a super-warrior,
capable of leading a human fleet into battle against a race of
insect-like "buggers", who are challenging humanity for the supremacy
of space, even threatening humanity's continued existence.
An alternative
reading of Card's text draws from the generational power-shift
around the new technologies of computing and simulation. Ender
Wiggin represents the child raised within the electronic age,
fully able to harness its capabilities to his own ends. However,
without the age and wisdom to use his power wisely, he is deceived
into fighting a war that he believes is entirely synthetic, constructed
as part of his training in "Battle School". When, after a climactic
battle scene, Ender realizes that he has in reality committed
xenocide - the intentional destruction of an entire species
- that the Battle School is, in fact, an elaborate real-time control
system for Earths' fleets of warships, he understands that he
has committed the ultimate sin, an absolute loss of innocence
which is among the most moving moments in the entire canon of
science fiction.
Written in
the first great flush of the video game era - a time when Atari
was growing to billion-dollar status - Card neatly reverses the
power flows of culture, placing a seven year-old child into the
pivotal role as human protector, but pairs this with the absolute
destructive capabilities forced on him by his protectors. In the
wake of the Persian Gulf War - the "videogame" war, the distinctions
between Card's fable and reality have collapsed remarkably; children
playing in elaborate simulation environments have become the marshal
arm of the state, using the screen as a mechanism with which they
can dehumanize the enemy, making them more effective soldiers.
Above and
beyond the ethical dimensions of Card's work - which has extended
into five sequel volumes - Ender's Game had a significant
effect in the world of software development. The vision of the
"Battle Desk", the educational and training environment provided
to Ender in the Battle School, reached Silicon Valley's newest
generation of personal computer software designers and hackers,
including the renowned John Walker, who, with 8 other partners,
founded Autodesk Corporation. Drawing from the possibilities expressed
in Ender's Game, the Autodesk founders created several "environments",
software products modeled after concepts found in the Battle Desk.
One of these, AutoCAD, has become the de facto standard
for computer-aided design.
All of the
Autodesk founders, great fans of Card's work, saw in it the possibilities
of the electronic future, and, using their own particular talents,
concretized Card's visions in a series of products. As the 1980s
progressed, Autodesk would become a leader in the virtual reality
industry, and Ender's Game was continually cited as an
inspiration by Autodesk employees, even over William Gibson's
Neuromancer.
Brunner,
Vinge and Card set the stage for the cyberpunk movement - brewing
in the short stories of writers like William Gibson and Bruce
Sterling - as they identified the hacker community as central
to the emerging electronic culture; in giving these hackers a
vision, they also engendered the concretization of the ideas they
expressed in their works.
Part Two: Burning Chrome to Snow Crash (1982
- 1992)
Readers of
the March 1992 OMNI - a favored magazine in hacker culture
- found in its pages a short story by a then-unknown writer named
William Gibson. The story, titled "Burning Chrome", changed the
world. In its opening lines, it introduced a throwaway product
name, "Ono-Sendai Cyberspace Seven", which would - because if
its particular meaning in the minds it encountered - become the
central obsession of Millennial electronic culture.
Taking a
page from Brunner, "Burning Chrome" relates the story of two "cowboy"
hackers who break into the financial databases of a barely legitimate
procuress. However, the theft takes place entirely within a synthetic,
imaginal realm that Gibson termed "the matrix":
The matrix
is an abstract representation of the relationships between data
systems. Legitimate programmers jack themselves into their employer's
sector of the matrix and find themselves surrounded by bright
geometries representing the corporate data.
And:
Towers and
fields of it ranged in the colorless non-space of the simulation
matrix, the electronic consensus-hallucination that facilitates
the handling and exchange of massive quantities of data.
In the context
of the emerging sciences of computer graphics and human computer
interactions (HCI), these few words decompressed into a galaxy
of specific meanings, interfaces, approaches to software design
which would influence the field for many years. Most specifically,
the word "cyberspace", now in hyper-common usage as the descriptor
for the inclusive field of electronic communication, shows how
a single idea in Gibson's work, has, first in hacker culture,
and then in the broader culture (as hackers came to dominate it)
become synonymous with a concrete system of products.
Specific
examples, such as Hani Rashid's work for the New York Stock Exchange
(Asymptote Architects, 1999), illustrate that the vision delivered
by Gibson in "Burning Chrome" has been developed in toto
into a tool for the manipulation of vast quantities of financial
data, a literal interpretation of the work as a functional description
of a software system.
Although
"Burning Chrome" reached the hacker community with a vision of
the electronic culture of the future, the publication of Gibson's
first novel, Neuromancer (1991), created an entirely new
discourse of virtuality, and had a broad and still-unfolding impact
on the culture at large. Allucquere Rosanne Stone, writing in
Cyberspace: First Steps (Benedikt, et. al., 1991), reports
on the auto-catalytic effects of the text as it encountered the
communities it would thereby define:
Arguably
the single most significant event for the development of fourth-stage
virtual communities was the publication of William Gibson's science
fiction novel Neuromancer. Neuromancer represents
the dividing line between the third and fourth epochs not because
it signaled any technological development, but because it crystallized
a new community, just as Boyle's scientific papers...did in an
earlier age.
And:
Neuromancer
reached the hackers who had been radicalized by George Lucas'
powerful cinematic evocation of humanity and technology infinitely
extended, and it reached the technologically literate and socially
disaffected who were searching for social forms that could transform
the fragmented anomie that characterized life in Silicon Valley
and all electronic industrial ghettos. In a single strong, Gibson's
powerful vision provided for them the imaginal public sphere and
refigured discursive community that established the grounding
for the possibility of a new kind of social interaction...Neuromancer
in the time of Reagan and DARPA is a massive intertextual presence
not only in other literary productions of the 1980s, but in technical
publications, conference topics, hardware design, and scientific
and technological discourses in the large.
As Stone
reports, the publication of Neuromancer produced a spontaneous
act of self-recognition among widely scattered communities of
interest. Within a few months after its release, the term "virtual
reality" was coined by Jaron Lanier. Efforts at research facilities
as diverse as NASA Ames Research Center and the University of
North Carolina, which had been progressing along similar, though
hardly identical lines, suddenly came to be seen as "cyberspace"
research.
During this
period, when Neuromancer was published, "virtual reality"
acquired a new name and suddenly prominent social identity as
"cyberspace". The critical importance of Gibson's book was partly
due to the way that it triggered a conceptual revolution among
the scattered workers who had been doing virtual reality research
groups for years: As task groups coalesced and dissolved, as the
fortunes of companies and projects and laboratories rose and fell,
the existence of Gibson's novel and the technological and social
imaginary that it articulated enabled the researchers in virtual
reality - or, under the new dispensation, cyberspace - to recognize
and organize themselves as a community.
Because it
produced a seductive mythology of possibility - cyberspace, after
all, is a software artifact, and therefore achievable simply by
writing code - Neuromancer completely energized the hacker
community; the grand project of hackers in the 1980s and 1990s,
the "sexiest" work, revolved around the production of virtual
reality systems and virtual communities. The author found himself
swept up in Gibson's vision, and in 1991, founded a virtual reality
company that he named "Ono-Sendai", pointing directly back at
the inspiration for his own work. It can only be stated that this
was a common occurrence in the years after the publication of
Neuromancer; thousands of hackers around the world began their
own VR projects, working to actualize the text into artifacts.
Although
Gibson had many admirers - and many imitators - he remained the
singular force in cyberpunk science fiction - as this movement
came to be known - throughout the 1980s. No other writer had so
eloquently and emotionally effected the direction of the hacker
community, until Neal Stephenson published Snow Crash in
1992.
Snow Crash
presents a post-Modern view of post-Millennial electronic culture,
an infosphere so polluted by competing economic and ideological
interests that reality has become impossibly bound up with its
virtualization in the "Metaverse", the field of human activity
in cyberspace. As in Neuromancer, the protagonist - named
Hiro Protagonist - is a hacker par excellence, but in Snow
Crash, Protagonist becomes the savior of humanity, fighting
against a set of ideas/ viruses/software known as Snow Crash,
which transform the innate linguistic abilities of human beings
into a prelapsarian Babel of glossalia. The confusion of codes
(drug, virus, religion) produces an equivalence between them,
and Protagonist becomes the one person grasps the significance
of this equivalence, using this knowledge to create a cultural
"anti-virus", inoculating humanity - and in particular, his hacker
comrades - from the vicissitudes of Snow Crash.
In both Snow
Crash and Neuromancer, the position of the hacker as
protagonist and savior gives these texts special significance
in the hacker communities; an act of self-identification takes
place almost unconsciously when a hacker reads these texts; when
this happens, the osmotic flow of memes can progress in full force,
and the technological visions expressed within the texts become
hyper-saturated with meaning. The creation of technical artifacts
becomes an act of identification with the protagonists.
Unlike Gibson,
who publicly professes an almost Luddite distrust of technological
apparatus (Gibson wrote Neuromancer on a manual typewriter),
Stephenson has been trained as a software engineer, and brought
his understanding of software architectures to bear in Snow
Crash, some parts of which read like detailed software designs,
particularly in his description of the "Metaverse". In a sense,
Snow Crash can be read as the recoding of the evocative
language of Neuromancer - broad and ambiguous - into a
specific set of techniques that can be defined in quantitative
terms.
Because it
is so specific, and so evocative, Snow Crash has, like
Neuromancer before it, added another word to the language
of electronic communication. The term "avatar" (Sanskrit for "incarnation
of a god") has come to define the human presence in cyberspace,
at least insofar as it can be localized to a position in cyberspace.
Originally coined by Chip Morningstar (Morningstar and Farmer,
1991), the term has now entered common usage. Further, just as
a slew of companies named themselves after companies in Neuromancer's
dystopian universe, another generation of entrepreneur software
engineers took their own company names - and products - directly
from the pages of Snow Crash. For example, Black Sun Interactive,
named after the super-hacker gathering place in the "Metaverse"
(recently renamed Blaxxun to avoid infringement), founded in Germany
in 1994, specializes in the creation of 3D VRML "avatar" environments
on the World Wide Web, a direct translation of Stephenson's vision
into a software artifact.
Neuromancer
and Snow Crash can be seen as "bookends", defining the
opening and closing of the "classical" era of cyberpunk fiction.
Emerging in the brief span between the invention of global electronic
networks and their widespread implementation as the World Wide
Web, these texts fundamentally shaped our expectations of the
electronic era, because they had a defining influence on the communities
which created the artifacts that support electronic communication.
Furthermore, Snow Crash, because it appeared on the cusp
of the Internet revolution, was picked up and carried by it, like
flotsam atop a tsunami. The original myths of cyberspace are Stephenson's,
and his vision has become ours.
Part Three:
The Diamond Age to Diaspora (1995 - 1999)
Cultural
theorist N. Katherine Hayles (Hayles, 1993) has noted the co-emergence
of two sets of synthetic ideas during the 1980s: virtual reality,
which sees the world as a screen upon which any vision might be
projected, and nanotechnology, which sees the world as a material
fabric into which any vision might be projected. Noting
the ontological similarity of these apparently disparate research
endeavors, she indicates that both imply a reflective world-view,
where the concept of "reality" becomes entirely subordinated to
the field of human experience expressed upon it. Both turn the
world into code - simulated or actualized in the fabric of matter
- and both provide an idealized universe for the hacker.
In the current
era of science fiction, the consilience between the real
and the virtual has become the dominant theme; hackers have moved
from hacking cultural codes (Brunner), to synthetic worlds (Gibson),
and into the real world, drawing no distinctions between them.
Once again in the vanguard, Neal Stephenson followed Snow Crash
with The Diamond Age: or The Young Lady's Illustrated Primer
(1995), projecting himself into the late 21st century
(one of the characters from Snow Crash makes a brief appearance
as an aged schoolmistress), an era of a realized nanotechnology
which has ushered in an age of global hyper-abundance, without
resolving the myriad social inequities of wealth or class.
In fact,
The Diamond Age is really two nearly independent texts,
one of which concerns the development of the "seed", a fully realized
nanoassembler (Drexler, 1986), another of which concerns the "Young
Lady's Illustrated Primer", an interactive "storybook" which helps
a young lower-class child raise herself (by her bootstraps, as
it were) into the highest echelons of society and education. The
Primer, a rich virtual environment, requires nanotechnology in
its creation; in return, it teaches the child how to create with
nanotechnology, revealing to her the mechanical secrets of the
material world. By blending a still-nearly-unrealized technology
with one ultimate application of that technology - a "killer app"
- Stephenson provided both the means and the mythology which catalyzed
a collection of hackers, uninterested in the development of virtual
worlds, into a self-recognizing community of interest. Interest
in all things nanotechnological spiked after the publication of
The Diamond Age; it marked the beginning of a broader awareness
of the implications of nanotechnology, particularly within the
community of hackers - including those who had become loyal fans
after reading Snow Crash - who will likely be responsible for
the implementation of nano-computational elements, programming
reality.
The final
text which bears admission into this prestigious collection of
singular scientific works has the distinction of opening a new
vein in the discourse between the hacker community and the grand
projects of hackerdom. Greg Egan's Diaspora (1998) mixed
the virtual and nanotechnological with the principles of artificial
life and artificial evolution to produce a text whose long-term
impact, the author argues, will be at least as significant as
Gibson's Neuromancer.
In his earlier
works, such as Permutation City (1993) and Distress
(1995), Egan played with the boundaries between the simulated
in the real, and even touched upon the idea of evolution and growth
in a non-biological medium. But it is in the pages of Diaspora
that these ideas are fully realized, beginning with a stunning
and realistically described process of "psychogenesis" - the embryonic
growth of a conscious entity - in software.
The Konishi
mind seed was divided into a billion fields: short segments, six
bits long, each containing a simple instruction code. Sequences
of a few dozen instructions comprised shapers: the basic
sub-programs employed during psychogenesis...Where it was known
that only one code could lead to successful psychogenesis, every
route on the map converged on a lone island or narrow isthmus,
ocher against ocean blue. These infrastructure fields built the
basic mental architecture every citizen had in common, shaping
both the mind's overarching design and the fine details of vital
sub-systems.
Built on
a substrate of nanotechnology, Diaspora's "Konishi polis"
entirely straddles the boundary between the virtual and the real;
terms native to one are freely applied to the other, a mixing
of codes typical of this current age of hard science fiction,
brought here to an entirely new level. Egan goes on to describe
the fractally recursive emergence of sentient processes of consciousness:
By the thousandth
iteration, the connections between the traps had developed into
an elaborate network in its own right, and new structures had
arisen in this network - symbols - which could be triggered by
each other as easily as any data from the input channels...Mere
recognition was giving way to the first faint hints of meaning
By the end
of the exegesis, Egan has taken the concept of "psychogenesis"
from conception, through self-identity, and into ego-formation,
blending developmental psychology, artificial intelligence (constructivist)
and artificial life to produce a road map which, undoubtedly,
some hacker, radicalized by Egan's vision, will attempt to replicate
to produce a self-conscious system.
As the tools
and techniques of virtual reality, nanotechnology and of artificial
life become widely disseminated, hackers infected with visions
of a fusion of nanotechnology and synthetic evolution will concretize
their ideas into the designs of the hyper-animate forms of the
third Millennium.
Conclusion:
Spells and Codes
To sum up:
the recent history or hard science fiction has been the
defining influence on the direction of software systems development.
The hacker community has been strongly shaped by science fiction
texts, and this has lead to a direct, often literal concretization
of the ideas expressed in those texts. The "grand philosophers"
- which is to say, the writers - propose, in sweeping gestures,
the shape of things to come. To the degree they are successful
in "infecting" the hacker community with the beauty of their ideas,
they can expect to see those ideas brought to life.
When the
science fiction novel began moved first to recognize, then empower
the hacker subculture, making it the heroic focus of its mythology,
a series of memetic infections - texts - swept through that subculture,
seducing it into becoming the willing engine of creation, the
realizing force of fantasy. Since at least 1980, the epochal novels
of hard science fiction have, more than any economic force or
scientific goal, shaped the output of the hacker community. As
the hacker mindset digests the stuff of possibilities, it excretes
technologies, a one-to-one relationship between fiction and production
perhaps unprecedented in the history of the novel. Novels such
as Les Miserables and Uncle Tom's Cabin have sparked
social revolutions, but until Neuromancer, no text had
sparked a technological revolution, none had moved from aesthetic
to artifact.
In closing,
a question must be posed; is it possible to construct science
fiction stories so infectious in their technological and ontological
dimensions that entirely new revolutions in software can be catalyzed?
Can the hacker community be counted upon to dutifully mobilize
its resources to translate evocation into reality? Is this a repeatable
sociological phenomenon, and is it predictable? Will we wait until
it happens again - inadvertently - or should we play with these
forces ourselves?
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