The Unitarian Jihad is an amazing example of Web-enabled emergence.

Mon, 18 Jul 2005 10:40:35 GMT

A while ago, I posted an entry on the Unitarian Jihad. Well, this being the Web, it's taken on a life of its own. To see what I mean, check out the comprehensive Wikipedia entry on UJ, which describes the UJ as follows:

Unitarian Jihad is a nascent satirical religious/humanist movement which opposes religious extremism of all kinds through peaceful means.

The concept of the Unitarian Jihad originated in a column by writer Jon Carroll which was originally published in the San Francisco Chronicle on April 8, 2005. The column intentionally juxtaposed the Unitarian Universalist faith and rational discussion with the Islamic concept of (militant) Jihad, and used the conceit of having received an anonymous communique from the then non-existent group.

Note how many different sites mentioned in the entry have sprung up. One of my favorites is the name generator. Here is what it generated for me:

My Unitarian Jihad Name is: Brother Machine Gun of Quiet Reflection. Get yours.

While the spread of the UJ meme is a humorous example, it is nonetheless a powerful demonstration of how the Web enables the emergence of spontaneous order. Let me walk you through it:

I find out about the UJ article from one of the blogs or newsletters I read (I can't remember which).
I bookmark it in Furl: UJ Bookmark.
Several weeks later, I look at my UJ bookmark (long story having to do with looking into my Furl Religion folder for some other search on Unitarianism).
I notice that someone named number-six has also Furled UJ with the following comment: "See: http://homepage.mac.com/whump/ujname.html to get your uj name. More here: http://www.livejournal.com/community/unitarian_jihad/ .
So I go to the UJ page at livejournal.
I am amazed to find over 300 members listed on the UJ community page. I'm even more amazed to find that the community had apparently been created on the same day as the article, April 8, 2005!
From these pages I discover the name generators and the Wikipedia entry

The point of going through this in detail is to give you a flavor of the serendipity of the emergence process. Imagine, just a few months after an article is published an entire community and an rich set of Web resources emerge into being! This is enabled by two "new" aspects of the 2nd Web Generation (aka Web 2.0):

The ability of individuals to easily create new Web resources: content, groups, tools, bookmarks, etc.
The automatic generation of backlinks, e.g., who also linked this page, what pages contain this phrase

These two capabilities are at the heart of the Web's ability to generate spontaneous order.

A good memory is like a good notation.

Fri, 12 Nov 2004 11:26:41 GMT

While surfing the Getty Research Institute's Metadate resources (which is a great resource for information standards), I ran across this quote from Vannevar Bush's profoundly influential article "As We May Think" (which influenced Ted Nelson's Xanadu, which influenced Tim Berners-Lee's World Wide Web):

Presumably man's spirit should be elevated if he can better review his shady past and analyze more completely and objectively his present problems. He has built a civilization so complex that he needs to mechanize his record more fully if he is to push his experiment to its logical conclusion and not merely become bogged down part way there by overtaxing his limited memory. His excursion may be more enjoyable if he can reacquire the privilege of forgetting manifold things he does not need to have immediately to hand, with some assurance that he can find them again if they prove important. Vannevar Bush, "As We May Think", The Atlantic Monthly, July 1945. [emphasis added]
http://www.w3.org/History/1945/vbush/vbush-all.shtml

I love this quote because it reminds me of my favorite quote about the importance of good notation:

By relieving the brain of all unnecessary work, a good notation sets it free to concentrate on more advanced problems, and, in effect, increases the mental power of the race. Before the introduction of the Arabic notation, multiplication was difficult, and the division even of integers called into play the highest mathematical faculties. Probably nothing in the modern world would have more astonished a Greek mathematician than to learn that ... a large proportion of the population of Western Europe could perform the operation of division for the largest numbers. This fact would have seemed to him a sheer impossibility ... Our modern power of easy reckoning with decimal fractions is the almost miraculous result of the gradual discovery of a perfect notation. [...] By the aid of symbolism, we can make transitions in reasoning almost mechanically, by the eye, which otherwise would call into play the higher faculties of the brain. [...] It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilisation advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle -- they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments. [emphasis added]
-- Alfred North Whitehead, An Introduction to Mathematics, 1911

So Vannevar its talking about enabling humanity to simplify thought by minimizing what must be remembered, and Whitehead is talking about simplifying thought by minimizing the operations we can do without conscious thought. Both desires presages the computer's ability to augment human thought by carrying out mental operations, including memory, for us.

Nicholas Gall: Evolution

The Unitarian Jihad is an amazing example of Web-enabled emergence.

A good memory is like a good notation.