Real Rules of Innovation for the 21st Century (Part 1) (2004)

Making sense is the ability to read data as data and not noise. A matter of life and death when dealing with the flowing reality of the earth’s core: “If we consider that the oceanic crust on which the continents are embedded is constantly being created and destroyed (by solidification and remelting) and that even continental crust is under constant erosion so that its materials are recycled into the ocean, the rocks and mountains that define the most stable and durable traits of our reality would merely represent a local slowing down of this flowing reality.” (Manuel de Landa, 1997)

Reading this local slowing down of flowing reality has never been easy, in fact it has never been possible. There was no way of reading information in the data drawn by the patterns of the seismographs. Vulcanologists could but read in particular ways that refused to turn data into reliable information. Until Bernard Chouet, a physicist – after five years of intensive study – saw patterns where no one saw patterns before, decided what was data and what was not data. [6] He focused on a particular pattern that no one had seen before.

The challenge we are facing now is reading the flowing reality of our surface. How to store real-time information flows? How to chart them? Which are our seismographs? How do we match real-time processes with the signified that they are supposed to signify? How to find ways of deciding what is data and what is not data in the space of flows?