On Concentration

I've been thinking a lot about concentration lately. I don't mean that in the sense of focusing one's attention to a particular enterprise, but rather in how we benefit from the accumulation of intellectual goods. It is perhaps the single-most important ability of humans that we can remember and regurgitate things we have learned. For this reason, the first human to discover that fire could be made with a flint and tinder was able to pass this information on to others. This process, which has repeated itself countless times through history, and which has been greatly abetted by writing, numeric systems, the librarian's art and humanity's relentless inquisitiveness, has brought us the wonders of the age in the form of space travel, nanotechnology and the screen from which you are reading this.

An analogy can be found in nature. The oil we depend on for so much of our livelihood is a form of highly concentrated energy that accumulated from thousands of years of plants absorbing sunlight, storing the energy in the form of sugars, and then dying. The concentration of countless tons of the stuff, formed under enormous heat and pressure in geological processes resulted in the incredibly versatile liquid we put in our gas tanks today.

We can observe this process in a less geological time-frame. Some animal proteins, which all of us form in our bodies, must be converted from plant proteins. While a selective diet can help vegetarians get all 20 essential proteins, many of us choose to eat meat. When we eat a steak or a chicken breast, we are in fact consuming a concentrated form of that animal's diet. Their bodies have already converted plant proteins into animal proteins and have concentrated it in their flesh. This is why a protein-rich diet will almost always include meat: it simply offers the most bang for the buck.

This of course brings us to another facet of concentration: the process of diminishing returns. Figures vary, but the ratio of units of grain required to produce a unit of animal protein can range from about 7:1 for steer, 3.5:1 for pork and 2:1 for chicken. When we factor in the energy requirements of raising livestock, the ratios of energy per kilogram get into the double-digits.

However, I'll save the concept of the diminishing returns of food production and energy for another post. What I'm getting at here is that we rely on concentrations of energy to run our cars, of protein to fill our bellies and of knowledge to do just about anything else. What are the implications of this? I'd like to unpack the idea of concentrated knowledge for a moment and make an important distinction.

When knowledge is passed on between two people, or culturally, there is a certain presence to that knowledge: it is possessed equally, and yet it cannot be divided. This can be observed in how we learn to throw a spiral or that Friday follows Thursday. Once you know how to do something, you take ownership of it, and may share it with others. Once you learn the name of your siblings, you also 'own' this knowledge and can also share it freely. These are skills and facts. Here is a further distinction: facts just are, while skills are a mix of facts and practice.

I will not delve too deeply into epistemology because it is outside my particular pursuit at this time. Skills, however, hold a deep fascination for me. For it is in skills that knowledge, practice and the elusive vernacular are concentrated. Yet unlike animal proteins or petrochemicals, which are akin more to 'facts' in their makeup, skills are more flexible, subtle and ultimately more human.

Much has been written about the deskilling of the modern, western human. What we lack in skill, we have made up for in specialization. By focusing on a single task within a large, globally scaled organism, we earn monetary rewards which allow us to purchase products; these products, in turn, replace skills. Now, before I am accused of being a soft-handed academic, I should fully disclose that I spent eight years as a traditionally trained cabinetmaker. My skill-set left me woefully unprepared for the reality of the modern cabinetmaking profession: while I struggled to build frame-and-panel casework with handmade doors and hand-applied finishes, the client wanted everything cheaper, faster, and was willing to sacrifice quality to get it. My salvation: premade products that made the job easier, if less flexible. Doors were cheaper if you bought the standard sizes, and would come pre-finished. It was more profitable to farm out the installation to someone else, even if it meant sacrificing control. While any tradesperson can sympathize with this, we make similar compromises every day.

Processed meals instead of home-cooked ones. Replacing clothes instead of repairing them, or making our own, for that matter. Cars with engines that are unfathomable and unrepairable by anyone but the specialist. And 'design' that has become modular, or at the very least, an act of cutting and pasting ready-made products together. By relying on the concentrated knowledge in the form of products, (combustion engines, metallurgy, food processing, etc. etc) we are sacrificing our ownership of that fact or those skills. The concentrated intellectual input of three thousand years of mathematics may have resulted in my computer being able to surf the net, but I had no part in building its chipset or assembling its motherboard. Moreover, the people who did those things were divorced from the knowledge it took to design them. The knowledge is proprietary, the means of production and the act of production are severed (to riff on Marx), and one's only claim to any real ownership of it is strictly monetary.

Like the energy of thousands of years of sunlight contained in a single drop of oil, we certainly benefit from the intellectual concentration found in all the products we can buy. It would be foolish to suggest otherwise. Neither am I a historical sentimentalist, pining for a return to the horse and buggy. My point is that this concentration of skills into consumer goods, despite the purported range of choice it gives us, actually diminishes our choices. The sameness in suburban development, teenage fashions or the operating system for your computer all illustrate this phenomenon. John Steinbeck commented on the decline of the colloquial in 1960s America, a product of the ubiquitous television and radio. What we are witnessing today is a decline in vernacular design. By solving technical or style problems with products, with concentrations of embodied knowledge, we not only reduce design as an enterprise, but we ultimately diminish what it means to be human.