New Cities/New Soviets

October 31, 2003

Experiment/Collaboration

The experiement is a particularly fine form, and I am coming to appreciate its power. It is not simply a matter of being open to unexpected results. Openness is cool, but it is passive. If you want anything really interesting to happen, you have to do something.

An experiment is even better than just doing something and seeing the results: it means phrasing, as carefully as possible, what you hope to find out before you begin. This both guides your action and focuses your observation. And after the period of observation, there is an attempt to describe your results.

All this sounds really simple, stuff I learned in highschool. But it works nonetheless.

This exercise, to carefully test words and ideas against reality, is more than a crude quantification. It is by these words that the intensities of being can be shared.

What is at hand: as I am mastering the technical enterprise of the cart, I am coming to a new understanding of the cart work. I am making enough money, but money is not enough. It's not for riches I started this...but for what?

To relate my work to the work of others in a new way. To shake the tree and see what fell out...

So how is it going?

My ideas have changed so much since the outset. Some things I imagined are difficult or impossible -- can you believe I once considered that I would be able to push the cart around to do my shopping? Impossible! To drift about the city "on a roll of surf, feeding the hugry here and there"!? Not quite.

What is possible now?

This is the tricky part, because I am only just getting a hold on my tool. Bringing the new possibilities into focus demands more than just imagination. It demands an experiment.

"Scientific socialism" not for nothing, but more on that later...

I am slowly getting used to this, this proceeding forward in darkness. "And peril," I said, but things seem less dire now. An experiment is afoot, and I am in possession of a fine experimental tool. What do I want to know?

I want to study collaboration. It is collaboration that has brought me here, more than I ever could have imagined. Without the help of many people -- Molly and my parents being chief among them, and Andy, Mohammed, and Ali not far behind -- this experiment, this cart, would not exist, and could not work.

And experiment, too, serves collaboration; by solidly founding the words and ideas that is the infrastructure of future endeavors. This is why language plays such an important part in experiment. This is why this blog plays such an important part in the cart.

The machine might work very well indeed. The cart is the output of the collaboration between my life and other lives. The cart is the experimental tool. If the object of the experiment is collaboration, what is common between my life and others, the experiment produces results that can be immediately used to refine the tool.

It is not the end, but it could be a good beginning.

Posted by Sam at October 31, 2003 05:44 AM

MY MELON HEADED HERO
FERMI CREATED 'SENIORA FISSION'
IN THE EARLY THIRTIES
HIS EXPERIMENTS ,HIS MACHINES
WERE DOING THE TRICK
HE JUST WASN'T LOOKING FOR HER THEN

LATER ONLY WHEN OTHERS WERE LOOKING FOR HER
DID THEIR FAR LESS CLEVER EXPERIMENTS FIND FISSION WAITING FOR THEM
ONE HAS TO IMAGINE HER
WITH HER INEVITABLE GUM CHEWING
SAYING SOMETHING LIKE
"ABOUT TIME HARD ONS "

Posted by: Anonymous at November 2, 2003 09:10 AM

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