Neologism Watch: Sousveillance

Jerry Brito this week has a great column on the idea of "sousveillance":

"Sousveillance is the recording of an activity by a participant in that activity, and it can be thought of as the inverse of surveillance. The word “sur” in French means “over” or “above,” hence surveillance is “watching from above” or “overseeing.” The word “sous,” by contrast, means “under” or “below.” To date, “veillance” has only been available to the powerful–whether through corporate or government CCTV cams perched atop buildings or utility poles–but with the advent of cheap wearable computers we will all soon be able to point a camera back at the powers that be from below."

Rapid adoption of technologies like smartphones, drones, and small wearable cameras really does necessitate an unpacking of the concept of veillance into more specific sub-categories. Sousveillance is creative, and provides a nice logical opposite to big institutional observation and recording. There's clearly still space in the middle, however, that remains undefined and murky. What should we call veillance that's carried out by individual participants but sponsored and organized by big institutions (Google maps, or police squad car cameras)? What about sousveillance that's collected in a disorganized distributed way but aggregated by central institutions?

Neologism Watch: Spandrel

Okay, so this isn't really a true neologism, but every so often I'll run across a word or idea that instantly clarifies something I didn't even know I was confused about. Typically this means unifying some set of diverse concepts, or providing a crystal-clear framing of some complex theoretical notion. A good example is the idea of the meme. Recently, I've observed a concept popping up that is potentially quite epic in its utility and scope: the spandrel.

Originally an architectural term for the triangular-shaped space between the outside of an arch and some other boundary (corner, pillar, another arch, etc.), spandrels were appropriated by paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould and geneticist Richard Lewontin in a fascinating (and quite readable) 1979 paper on evolutionary biology. In it, they define spandrels as "the class of forms and spaces that arise as necessary byproducts of another decision in design, and not as adaptations for direct utility in themselves." A casual observer might see the highly ornamented spandrels of a Renaissance cathedral and conclude that they were designed and constructed specifically for artistic reasons. In fact, the space was simply left over by architectural necessity, and later endowed with purpose.

Although employed primarily in evolutionary biology, other fields can clearly benefit from a succinct and clever term for forms arising as byproducts rather than as adaptations or from planning. Are dreams a neurological spandrel? Did language arise as a cultural spandrel? Are the 10 (or 11, or 26, or whatever) dimensions proposed by some models in theoretical physics just mathematical spandrels? In evolutionary biology, certain species' maladaptive characteristics that had long confounded trait-based theories were easily explained using spandrels. What other sorts of behaviors or characteristics might be best conceptualized as spandrels?

One of the most interesting theories explaining the human predisposition toward magical thinking and religion involves spandrels. It goes like this: as a human, you have access only to your own consciousness (and nobody else's). That means determining which objects in the external world are also conscious (endowed with agency) is in principle impossible. As young humans develop, they learn to distinguish between inanimate objects (like rocks) and objects with agency (like other humans, or animals). For those objects with agency, we project the sensation of consciousness onto them. Usually this works out pretty well, but sometimes mistakes are made. Because the psychological machinery for projection exists, it occasionally misfires and we accidentally project consciousness onto inanimate objects or phenomena. So when a fire destroys the village but spares your hut, or when lightning destroys your hut but nobody else's, God didn't do it; rather that gut reaction is just an unfortunate byproduct of human psychology. A cognitive spandrel.

Start looking, and you'll begin to see spandrels everywhere. More often than not you'll walk away with some fascinating original insights.

Neologism Watch: 'Anthropocene'

Anybody who witnessed the strange furor over Pluto's demotion from official planet to dwarf planet knows that scientific categories matter. More than factual data, categories shape our perception and influence our values. That's why the recent push to establish a new geologic epoch defined by human impact, called the 'Anthropocene,' is cause for celebration and support.

To be sure, geologic categories should be determined by geologists through rigorous inquiry and public reasoning. Yet the fact that human-driven processes are leaving permanent imprints on the Earth with magnitudes equivalent to other past epoch-defining events should make it a one-sided debate.

An official Anthropocene category could generate a fantastic branding campaign to combat the corrosive belief in a static, historically-fixed Earth. Many environmentalists, by focusing solely on avoiding future environmental damage, neglect a powerful message concerning the changes already wrought by human technology. Bill McKibben's Eaarth is perhaps the best manifesto of this sort, methodically listing current environmental changes caused by global heating and ecological destruction. Fostering environmentalist preferences among a global population still reeling from economic catastrophe has been difficult, not least due to the supposedly vague, far-off nature of environmental costs. But the fact is humanity has made the world its own, whether we like it or not. It's time we formalized this harsh reality.

Neologism Watch: Mesoeconomics

The field of microeconomics deals with buyers and sellers, while macroeconomics studies aggregate supply and demand. But what about economic activity between levels? 'Mesoeconomics' seems to be a vaguely-defined, catch-all term for the analysis of structures lying in this middle-ground.

There appears to be much confusion about which economics sub-fields fall within mesoeconomics. Game theory is often categorized as mesoeconomic, yet economics can no more claim game theory as its own than it can statistics or differential calculus; these are methods, and by convention academic disciplines are defined by the topic of study, not the tool.

Two fields that fit my conception of mesoeconomics are organizational economics and urban economics. Although concerned with different things (firms and location, respectively), both share the interesting quality of studying the threshold between individual actors and collective market action. Let me explain.

Organizational economics studies the threshold between firms and markets: why does some economic activity occur within a firm, and some occur between firms, in markets? Similarly, urban economics studies the threshold of urban agglomerations: why do some firms choose to locate within a city, while others don't? Why do some cities grow, and others shrink? These 'threshold' questions, tackling mechanisms through which small translates into large, are at the core of mesoeconomics.