Musil's Fiction of Crowdsourcing Failure

Musil's great book The Man Without Qualities is set in Vienna in 1913. People are pondering how they will celebrate the anniversary of the reign of the Emperor. The themes of the first part of the book converge on the problem of finding content for this event. A comitee is set up to scout for great ideas that the "great action" would then support. Uncountable propositions flood the organizers.

The great action dissolves in the stronger currents of nationalism and war. One could say that the book tells the story of the modern failure of the intellect from the point of view of the intellect.

Similarities with our time exist. A pessimist would say that "crowdsourcing" in politics is, perhaps comically, similar to the "great action" described in the book more often than not.

The solution offered (in vain) by the main protagonist Ulrich also speaks to our time. How to identify and organize the content of the "great action"? Ulrich envisions a general office for "precision and soul", a thorough classification of ideas managed as if the Day of Judgment were to come in a year.

Classification was becoming a problem in itself for the author :

"Mit Hilfe eines ausgeklügelten Verweisapparates, Seiten-Chiffren, die aus Abkürzungen und Ziffern kombiniert sind, strebte Musil ein Referenzsystem an, das sein gesamtes Arbeitsmaterial intern durchdringen und für stets umfassendere konzeptionelle Ordnungen verfügbar halten sollte. Die Verweise binden die zahlreichen Konvolute zu einem organischen Textsystem zusammen; die durch die Chiffren hergestellten Verbindungen sind die Nervenbahnen dieses Organismus. Alles in allem bedeutet er einen sich selbst reproduzierenden, erst im Tod zum Stillstand gekommenen Körper, ein bewusstes, damit potenziertes Fragment."

Villö Huszai, Digitalisierung und Utopie des Ganzen

["By using a link-system based on page-codes combining abbreviations and numbers, Musil attempted a reference-system that would penetrate the inside of all his working material and make it available for ever more comprehensive conceptual reorderings. The links connect numerous masses into an organic text system. The code-engendered connections are the nervous pathways of this organism. All in all this system points to a self-reproducing body, only brought to stillness by death : a conscious, and thus empowered fragment."]

The new Klagenfurt Edition permits to navigate the vast ocean of fragments that were never to be united in a finished work.

It is a book in which problems of form are inseparable from problems of content. There is a chapter that depicts the bewilderment of an army general confronted with the challenge of finding a great idea inside a library. Are these not the same challenges we meet today when it comes to extracting relevance from information networks? The ancient human theme of thematic organization has been intensified by modernity via the diffusion of bureaucracy analyzed by Max Weber, but the Internet Age has truly made it its absolute central theme.

Perhaps we are in some ways closer to 1913 than we'd like to think. What would 1914 have looked like if a great international crowdsourcing action in 1913 had actually been successful?

Lists vs Groups

Interesting move by Twitter. There is potential in the recent 'list' feature. Unlike the 'groups' on Facebook, LinkedIn, ... list members do not apply for membership, they are simply picked by the list creator. There is nothing official about the list (as opposed to LinkedIn especially). Although the social factor is not eliminated from relevance production, it is a lot less present. It is a lot more about content than people, in this sense. The lists are less about identifying a tweeter than about organizing tweets. Many have noted that the number of lists functions as a popularity index. But this popularity could contain a lot of relevance-based, weakly-personal popularity. Lists are inherently theme-oriented, as opposed to person-oriented. Groups on the other hand are more person- and community- oriented. But again Twitter functions differently here, via hashtag-coordination.

These different design strategies are fascinating. What Twitter just did with lists reminds me of the 'interests' feature on Livejournal (see here for a brilliant analysis by C. Shirky). It is not necessary to have built-in heterogeneity-reduction, because the system will self-organize. It will be interesting to observe and participate in list diffusion on Twitter.

I am also liking what Delicious did with tags. Very simple and flexible solution.