The Third Culture
by Kevin Kelly
Kevin Kelly wrote
the following essay
for Science
Magazine's
"Essays on Science
and Society", in
celebration of the
150th anniversary
of that publication.
The second essay
in the series
(following "The Great Asymmetry" by Stephen
Jay Gould), it appeared in the Volume 279,
Number 5353 Issue of 13 February 1998, pp.
992 - 993 of Science and it is also available
on the Science Online website. It is published
here for the third culture mail list by permission
of the author.
Kevin Kelly is the executive editor of
Wired and author of Out of Control: The New Biology
of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic
World.
THE THIRD CULTURE
"Science" is a lofty term. The word
suggests a process of uncommon rationality, inspired
observation, and near-saintly tolerance
for failure. More often than not, that's what
we get from science. The term "science" also
entails people aiming high. Science has
traditionally accepted the smartest students, the most
committed and self-sacrificing
researchers, and the cleanest money-that is, money with the
fewest political strings attached. In both
theory and practice, science in this century has
been perceived as a noble endeavor.
Yet science has always been a bit outside
society's inner circle. The cultural center of
Western civilization has pivoted around the arts,
with science orbiting at a safe distance. When
we say "culture," we think of books, music, or
painting. Since 1937 the United States has anointed
a national poet laureate but never a
scientist laureate. Popular opinion has held that
our era will be remembered for great art, such as
jazz. Therefore, musicians are esteemed.
Novelists are hip. Film directors are cool. Scientists,
on the other hand, are ...nerds.
How ironic, then, that while science sat
in the cultural backseat, its steady output of
wonderful products-radio, TV, and computer
chips-furiously bred a pop culture based
on the arts. The more science succeeded in
creating an intensely mediated environment, the more
it receded culturally.
The only reason to drag up this old
rivalry between the two cultures is that recently
something surprising happened: A third
culture emerged. It's hard to pinpoint exactly
when it happened, but it's clear that computers
had a lot to do with it. What's not clear yet is
what this new culture means to the original two.
This new third culture is an offspring of
science.It's a pop culture based in technology,
for technology. Call it nerd culture. For the
last two decades, as technology supersaturated our
cultural environment, the gravity of
technology simply became too hard to ignore. For this
current generation of Nintendo kids, their
technology is their culture. When they
reached the point (as every generation of youth
does) of creating the current fads, the next funny
thing happened: Nerds became cool.
Nerds now grace the cover of Time and
Newsweek. They are heroes in movies and
Man of the Year. Indeed, more people wanna be
Bill Gates than wanna be Bill Clinton.
Publishers have discovered that cool nerds and cool
science can sell magazines to a jaded and weary
audience.Sometimes it seems as if technology itself
is the star, as it is in many special-effects
movies.There's jargon, too. Cultural centers
radiate new language; technology is a supernova of
slang and idioms swelling the English language.
Nerds have contributed so many new words-most
originating in science-that dictionaries can't track
them fast enough.
This cultural realignment is more than the
wisp of fashion, and it is more than a mere
celebration of engineering. How is it different? The
purpose of science is to pursue the truth of the
universe. Likewise, the aim of the arts is to
express the human condition. (Yes, there's plenty of
overlap.) Nerd culture strays from both of
these. While nerd culture deeply honors the rigor
of the scientific method, its thrust is not
pursuing truth, but pursuing novelty. "New," "improved,"
"different" are key attributes for this
technological culture. At the same time,
while nerd culture acknowledges the starting
point of the human condition, its hope is not
expression, but experience. For the new culture, a
trip into virtual reality is far more significant
than remembering Proust.
Outlined in the same broad strokes, we can
say that the purpose of nerdism, then, is to
create novelties as a means to truth and
experience. In the third culture, the way to settle the
question of how the mind works is to build a working
mind. Scientists would measure and test a mind;
artists would contemplate and abstract it. Nerds
would manufacture one. Creation, rather than
creativity, is the preferred mode of
action. One would expect to see frenzied, messianic
attempts to make stuff, to have creation race ahead
of understanding, and this we see already. In
the emerging nerd culture a question is framed
so that the answer will usually be a new
technology.
The third culture creates new tools faster
than new theories, because tools lead to novel
discoveries quicker than theories do. The
third culture has little respect for scientific
credentials because while credentials may imply
greater understanding, they don't imply greater
innovation. The third culture will favor
the irrational if it brings options and
possibilities, because new experiences trump rational
proof.
If this sounds like the worst of pop
science, in many ways it is. But it is also worth
noting how deeply traditional science swirls through
this breed. A lot of first-class peer-reviewed
science supports nerdism. The term "third culture"
was first coined by science historian C. P.
Snow. Snow originated the concept of dueling
cultures in his famous book, The Two Cultures.1
But in an overlooked second edition to the
book published in 1964, he introduced the
notion of a "third culture." Snow imagined a culture
where literary intellectuals conversed directly
with scientists. This never really happened.
John Brockman, a literary agent to many bright
scientists, resurrected and amended Snow's
term. Brockman's third culture meant a
streetwise science culture, one where working
scientists communicated directly with lay people, and
the lay challenged them back. This was a
peerage culture, a peerage that network technology
encouraged.
But the most striking aspect of this new
culture was its immediacy. "Unlike previous
intellectual pursuits," Brockman writes, "the
achievements of the third culture are not the marginal
disputes of a quarrelsome mandarin class: They will
affect the lives of everybody on the planet."2
Technology is simply more relevant than
footnotes.
There are other reasons why technology has
seized control of the culture. First, the
complexity of off-the-shelf discount
computers has reached a point where we can ask
interesting questions such as: What is reality? What
is life? What is consciousness? and get answers
we've never heard before. These questions, of
course, are the same ones that natural
philosophers and scientists of the first two cultures have
been asking for centuries. Nerds get new
answers to these ancient and compelling questions not
by rehashing Plato or by carefully setting up
controlled experiments but by trying to
create an artificial reality, an artificial life, an
artificial consciousness-and then plunging themselves
into it. Despite the cartoon rendition
I've just sketched, the nerd way is a third way of
doing science.
Classical science is a conversation
between theory and experiment. A scientist can
start at either end-with theory or experiment-but
progress usually demands the union of both
a theory to make sense of the experiments
and data to verify the theory. Technological
novelties such as computer models are neither here nor
there. A really good dynamic computer model-of the
global atmosphere, for example-is like a
theory that throws off data, or data with a
built-in theory. It's easy to see why such
technological worlds are regarded with such wariness by
science-they seem corrupted coming and
going. But in fact, these models yield a third
kind of truth, an experiential synthesis-a
parallel existence, so to speak. A few years ago
when Tom Ray, a biologist turned nerd, created a
digital habitat in a small computer and then
loosed simple digital organisms in it to
procreate, mutate, and evolve, he was no longer
merely modeling evolution or collecting data.
Instead, Ray had created a wholly new and novel
example of real evolution.
That's nerd science. As models and
networked simulations take on further complexity and
presence, their role in science will
likewise expand and the influence of their nerd
creators increase.
Not the least because technological
novelty is readily accessible to everyone. Any
motivated 19-year-old can buy a PC that is fast
enough to create something we have not seen before.
The nerds who lovingly rendered the virtual
dinosaurs in the movie Jurassic Park, by creating a
complete muscle-clad skeleton moving
beneath virtual skin, discovered a few things
about dinosaur locomotion and visualized
dinosaurs in motion in a way no paleontologist had done
before. It is this easy, noncertified
expertise and the unbelievably cheap access to
increasingly powerful technology that is also driving
nerd science. Thomas Edison, the founder of
Science magazine, was a nerd if ever there was
one.
Edison-lacking any formal degree,
hankering to make his own tools, and possessing a "just
do it" attitude-fits the profile of a nerd.
Edison held brave, if not cranky, theories, yet
nothing was as valuable to him as a working "demo" of an
invention. He commonly stayed up all night
to hack together contraptions, powered by
grand entrepreneurial visions (another hallmark
of nerds), yet he didn't shirk from doing
systematic scientific research. One feels certain
that Edison would have been at home with computers and
the Web and all the other techno-paraphernalia
now crowding the labs of science.
Techno-culture is not just an American
phenomenon, either. The third culture is
as international as science. As large numbers
of the world's population move into the global
middle class, they share the ingredients needed
for the third culture: science in schools; access
to cheap, hi-tech goods; media saturation; and most
important, familiarity with other nerds
and nerd culture. I've met Polish nerds, Indian
nerds, Norwegian nerds, and Brazilian nerds. Not
one of them would have thought of themselves as
"scientists." Yet each of them was
actively engaged in the systematic discovery of our
universe.
As nerds flourish, science may still not
get the respect it deserves. But clearly,
classical science will have to thrive in order for the third
culture to thrive, since technology is so
derivative of the scientific process. The question I would
like to posit is: If the culture of technology
should dominate our era, how do we pay attention
to science? For although science may feed
technology, technology is steadily
changing how we do science, how we think of science,
and what it means to be a scientist. Tools have
always done this, but in the last few decades our
tools have taken over. The status of the technologist
is ascending because for now, and for the
foreseeable future, we have more to learn
from making new tools than we do from making
new concepts or new measurements.
As the eminent physicist Freeman Dyson
points out, "The effect of concept-driven
revolution is to explain old things in new ways. The
effect of tool-driven revolution is to discover new
things that have to be explained" (p. 50 ).3 We
are solidly in the tool-making era of
endlessly creating new things to explain.
While science and art generate truth and
beauty, technology generates opportunities: new
things to explain; new ways of expression; new media
of communications; and, if we are honest, new
forms of destruction. Indeed, raw
opportunity may be the only thing of lasting value
that technology provides us.
It's not going to solve our social ills,
or bring meaning to our lives. For those, we need
the other two cultures. What it does bring
us-and this is sufficient-are possibilities.
Technology now has its own culture, the
third culture, the possibility culture, the
culture of nerds-a culture that is starting to go
global and mainstream simultaneously. The culture of
science, so long in the shadow of the
culture of art, now has another orientation to
contend with, one grown from its own rib. It remains to
be seen how the lofty, noble endeavor of science
deals with the rogue vernacular of technology,
but for the moment, the nerds of the third culture
are rising.
1. C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution
(Cambridge Univ. Press, New York, 1959).
2. J. Brockman, The Third Culture (1996).
Available at www.edge.org/3rd_culture/index.html.
3. F. Dyson, Imagined Worlds (Harvard Univ. Press, Cambridge, MA,
1997).Volume 279, Number 5353 Issue of 13 February 1998, pp.
992 - 993
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