Cramming Technologies into an Elevator

My brother the architect once explained to me the key to building things successfully. By building he meant not just framing, erecting walls and roofs and so on, but everything: flooring, painting, pouring foundations, and so on. All of it, he said, had one critical element: edges. How an architect or builder or home handyman handles edges defines his or her success at it. Buildings fall down; patterned wallpaper fails to match up at the seams; bookshelves wobble, and a marble placed on the floor rolls freely from one corner to another.

This doesn’t apply just to physical structures, to edifices. It applies, I think, to just about everything artificial.

One of Merry-Go-Round‘s underlying themes is the fragility of technology. Any one piece of equipment or software, even two or three, may work just fine after being tested and tested and tested. The word for this is “robustness”: the more robust a system, the closer it is to that magical (and mythical) state commonly known as fail-safe.

Where problems begin to arise is, yes, along the edges: those conceptual little nooks and crannies where the surfaces of multiple technologies come together.

A recent demonstration of this problem is in Plano, Texas. From a Dallas Morning News story (via Engadget):

The cities of Cedar Hill, DeSoto and Duncanville recently began testing a powerful new police communications system, but the system is so robust that the radio signals are reaching as far as 30 miles away.

In Plano, the signals have wreaked havoc on a network of radio-controlled sprinklers the city uses at parks and road medians, prompting expensive system upgrades and a complaint by the city to the Federal Communications Commission.

…Plano officials say they should have been notified of the new police system in advance. Tim Smith, managing director of the Southwest Regional Communications Center, the joint agency that runs the 911 emergency system for Cedar Hill, DeSoto and Duncanville, said Plano’s complaint is without merit.

“Which comes first: Watering plants or protecting police and fire?” he asked.

Of course, this is a story not just about technological conflicts. It illustrates, as well, the dangers to be found along the edges of bureaucratic and jurisdictional hierarchies (which are about as artificial as constructs can be).

Edges are everywhere. Novelists agonize about how to categorize their work, especially in a publishing culture where — as seems increasingly the case — to write unclassifiable “mainstream”/midlist fiction is to commit to an unpublished future. So they come up with weird genre blends: urban-fantasy crime novels, for instance, in which detectives solve murder mysteries using magic. (They’re hoping, you see, to come up with a new edge, a new stark and eye-catching line or corner where two or more familiar surfaces intersect.)

But right at the forefront of prominent, newsworthy edge-related breakdowns, there’s technology. Many people, maybe most people, don’t even pretend to understand computers and networking beyond what they need to understand for their personal or professional use. And honestly, they don’t need to understand all the surfaces involved, let alone all the zillion edges between surfaces.

Except that they do need to understand the following: the more edges you add to the picture, the greater the likelihood of breakdown. An old (as such things go) theory is that of “the magical number 7, plus or minus 2.” Translated to everyday use, this means that on average, a reasonably intelligent human being can juggle somewhere between five and nine mental “things” at one time. (This is allegedly why US telephone numbers within a given area code are seven digits long, for example.) So put a human being to work designing a whole system — computers, radio, electronic circuits, probably GPS technology and the like — and you’re risking way beyond that human’s capacity for success.

So you add staff: one person for each technology, say. Now you’ve solved one problem (maybe) but you’ve created dozens of new ones — because every human relationship constitutes another edge to be understood, worked with, and if you’re very lucky, made (ha ha) “fail-safe.” (Well, except of course there are turf issues. And hierarchies. And reputations, and egos, and prejudices… and… And then all those people have to understand one another’s surfaces enough — to ask and answer enough questions — that the edges aren’t quite so sharp and fragile.)

Again, as in the outside world, so in the mind of the writer.

Do you really want to write a novel from a dozen different alternating points of view? in multiple tenses? spread across multiple cities? and — of course! you want to be published! — in multiple genres, to boot?

You do, huh? You sure about that?