Imagine: How Creativity Works (27 page)

When we stroll down a crowded sidewalk, we meet people we didn’t want to meet and get answers to questions we didn’t even think to ask; knowledge leaks from everywhere. If the Internet is going to become an accelerator of creativity, then we need to design websites that act like our most innovative cities. Instead of sharing links with just our friends, or commenting anonymously on blogs, or filtering the world with algorithms to fit our interests, we must engage with strangers and strange ideas. The Internet has such creative potential; it’s so ripe with weirdness and originality, so full of people eager to share their work and ideas.

What we need now is a virtual world that brings us together for real.

The importance of cities is a testament to the necessity of sharing ideas. It doesn’t matter if this sharing takes place on Hudson Street or at bar full of engineers or during army reserve training — the exchange is all that matters. What’s interesting is that this urban dance cannot be choreographed in advance or controlled from above. Instead, the creativity of the metropolis is inseparable from its freedom, from the natural chaos of a densely populated Zip Code.

Geoffrey West makes this clear by comparing cities to corporations. At first, urban areas and companies look very similar. Each is a large agglomeration of people interacting in a well-defined physical space. They both contain infrastructure and human capital; the mayor of the city is like the CEO of the corporation.

But it turns out that cities and companies differ in one very fundamental regard: cities almost never die, while companies are extremely ephemeral. As West notes, a cataclysmic hurricane couldn’t wipe out New Orleans, and a massive nuclear bomb failed to erase Hiroshima from the map. In contrast, the modern corporation has an average lifespan of only forty-five years.

This fragility doesn’t apply to just small companies; only two of the original twelve companies in the Dow Jones Index are still in business, while 20 percent of the companies listed in the Fortune 500 disappear every decade.

This raises the obvious question: Why are corporations so fleeting? After spending twenty-five thousand dollars for statistics on more than eighty-five hundred publicly traded companies, West and Bettencourt discovered that corporate productivity, unlike urban productivity, didn’t increase with size. In fact, the opposite happened: as the number of employees grew, the amount of profit per employee shrank. (While cities are superlinear, companies are sublinear, scaling to an exponent around 0.9.) According to West, this decrease in per capita production is rooted in a failure of innovation. Instead of imitating the freewheeling city, these businesses minimize the very interactions that lead to new ideas. They erect walls and establish hierarchies. They keep people from relaxing and having insights. They stifle conversations, discourage dissent, and suffocate social networks. Rather than maximizing employee creativity, they become obsessed with minor efficiencies.

The danger, of course, is that this shortage of useful new ideas eventually leads to a decline in profits, which makes a large company increasingly vulnerable to market volatility. Since the company now has to support an expensive staff — overhead costs increase with size — even a minor disturbance can lead to massive losses, because the company is unable to adapt. “The psychology of Wall Street is that companies can never stop growing,” West says. “But the sublinear nature of the data suggests that such growth comes with real disadvantages.”

For West, the impermanence of the corporation illuminates the real strength of the metropolis. Unlike companies, which are managed in a top-down fashion by a team of highly paid executives, cities are unruly places, largely immune to the desires of politicians and planners. “Think about how powerless a mayor is,” West says. “Mayors can’t tell people where to live or what to do or who to talk to. Cities can’t be managed, and that’s what keeps them so vibrant. They’re just these insane masses of people bump-ing into each other and maybe sharing an idea or two. And it’s that spontaneous mixing, all those unpredictable encounters, that keeps the city alive.”

West illustrates the same point when talking about the Santa Fe Institute (SFI), the think tank where he and Bettencourt work. The institute itself is a disjointed collection of common areas, old couches, and tiny offices; the coffee room is always the most crowded place. “Sfiis all about the chance encounters,” West says. “There are no planned meetings, just lots of unplanned conversations. It’s like a little city that way.” (It’s also a bit like Pixar — everybody has to use the same bathrooms.) When I was visiting the institute, West and I ran into the novelist Cormac McCarthy in the lobby of the building, where McCarthy does much of his writing. The physicist and the novelist ended up talking about fish without gills, the editing process, and convergent evolution for forty-five minutes. “It’s moments like that that make this place so great,” West says before listing all the recent ideas to come out of SFI.
(A short list of the important ideas pioneered at Sfiincludes emergence, biological scaling, chaos theory, and quantum cosmology.)
“It might seem like we’re just bullshitting here, wasting time. And I guess maybe we are. But that’s also where all the breakthroughs come from.”

This is the purpose of cities: The crowded spaces force us to interact. They lead us to explore ideas that we wouldn’t explore on our own, and converse with strangers we’d otherwise ignore. The process isn’t always pleasant — there’s a reason people move to the suburbs — but it remains essential. The superlinear equations of West and Bettencourt quantify this remarkable process, measuring the predictable surges in innovation that happen whenever people share the sidewalk with lots of other people. Sometimes, these encounters will lead a person to invent a new patent or think about an old problem in a slightly different way. And sometimes they’ll lead him down the street to a Latin dance club where he’ll hear a rhythm he’s never heard before. It is the human friction that creates the sparks.

Ch. 8
 
THE SHAKESPEARE PARADOX

No man is an island.
— John Donne

A few years ago, David Banks, a statistician at Duke University, wrote a short paper called “The Problem of Excess Genius.” The problem itself is simple: human geniuses aren’t scattered randomly across time and space. Instead, they tend to arrive in tight, local clusters. (As Banks put it, genius “clots inhomogeneously.”) In his paper, Banks gives the example of Athens between 440 b.c. and 380 b.c. He notes that the ancient city over that time period was home to an astonishing number of geniuses, including Plato, Socrates, Pericles, Thucydides, Herodotus, Euripides, Sophocles, Aeschylus, Aristophanes, and Xenophon. These thinkers essentially invented Western civilization, and yet they all lived in the same place at the same time. Or look at Florence between 1450 and 1490. In those few decades, a city of less than fi fty thousand people gave rise to a staggering number of immortal artists, including Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Ghiberti, Botticelli, and Donatello.

What causes such outpourings of creativity? 
(The musician Brian Eno has a clever name for these local bursts of innovation. They are examples, he says, of “scenius,” which is the “communal form of genius.”)
 Banks quickly dismissed the usual historical explanations, such as the importance of peace and prosperity, noting that Athens was engaged in a vicious war with Sparta, and that Florence had recently lost half its population to the Black Plague. He also rejected “the paradigm thing” hypothesis, which argues that genius flourishes in the wake of a major intellectual revolution. The problem with this explanation, Banks said, is that it fails to account for all the paradigm shifts that did not inspire a burst of brilliance. The academic paper concludes on a somber note. “The problem of excess genius is one of the most important questions I can imagine, but very little progress has been made,” Banks wrote. The phenomenon remains a mystery.

And yet, it’s not a total mystery. While we may never know how Athens gave rise to Plato or why Florence became such a center of artistic talent, we can begin to make sense of the clustering of geniuses. The excess is not an accident.

1.

When William Shakespeare arrived in London, sometime in the mid-1580s, the city was in the midst of a theatrical boom. There were more than a dozen new playhouses, many of which staged a different play six days a week. On a typical night, approximately 2 percent of Londoners went to see a performance, with more than a third attending at least one play a month. This meant that the theater industry was both extremely competitive — there were at least a dozen different companies — and hungry for new talent.

And so, although Shakespeare had little theatrical experience, he left behind his wife and two young children and moved to London. Shakespeare’s new hometown was one of the densest settlements in human history. Approximately two hundred thousand people were packed into a few square miles on the banks of the Thames. In fact, the demand for space was so high that the new-est neighborhoods were stacked on top of old graveyards; basement walls were full of bones. While this unprecedented density came with drawbacks — riots and plague were a constant threat — it also had its economic advantages: wages in the metropolis were about 50 percent higher than elsewhere in the country.

(It turns out that the superlinear equations of West and Bettencourt applied even in the sixteenth century.) As a result, London continued to attract throngs of young people like Shakespeare. It’s estimated that by 1590, more than half of the city’s population was under the age of twenty.

The playhouses were at the center of this human maelstrom; they were the densest places in the densest city. Most of these new theaters were built on the outskirts of London, next to the brothels, prisons, and lunatic asylums. Land was cheaper here, but the playhouses also benefi ted from being just beyond the city line, which meant they were able to operate largely without regulation. Shakespeare probably performed for the first time at the Rose, a brand-new playhouse in Southwark with plaster walls and a thatched-straw roof. Although the inner yard of the Rose was only forty-six feet in diameter, it could accommodate an audience of nearly two thousand, giving it a density three times that of the typical modern playhouse.

In 1587, shortly after Shakespeare arrived in London, the Rose introduced Tamburlaine the Great, a new play by Christopher Marlowe. It was an epic drama, full of rampaging chariots, live cannons, and fake blood. While the plot was fairly straightforward — it’s about a Scythian shepherd who rises to become a dom-inant king — Marlowe pioneered a new kind of dramatic writing known as blank verse, in which the lines are bound by their meter and not their rhymes. This new literary form allowed Marlowe to fi ll the play with natural-sounding speech. It moved theater away from poetry — Marlowe castigated “rhyming mother-wits” — and toward narratives driven by their characters.

For the impressionable Shakespeare, Tamburlaine was a revelation. Marlowe had shown him what was possible onstage, creating a work that was both popular and profound. He had bent the predictable arc of the morality play into something more interesting, a vernacular drama with eternal themes. This was mass entertainment that did more than entertain. This play lingered in the mind.

But Tamburlaine must also have been diffi cult for Shakespeare to watch. Surely it was tough to see a playwright with such a similar biography — Marlowe had also been born in 1564 to a commoner father in a provincial town — create the kind of play that he himself wanted to create. Furthermore, Marlowe had been blessed with a crucial privilege that Shakespeare had been denied: a university education. In the early 1580s, Marlowe had been awarded a full scholarship to the University of Cambridge.

(The scholarship was intended to encourage “poor students of promise . . . such as can make verse.”) Marlowe decided to major in the arts and spent much of his time translating Ovid and Virgil.

Shakespeare would have witnessed the benefi ts of this education in Tamburlaine. While Marlowe borrowed the plot from a series of popular history books, he enriched the play with exotic details of Persia and Turkey; the script was full of knowing references to harems and banquets and old African kings. One of Marlowe’s main sources for these facts was an extremely expensive manuscript by Abraham Ortelius, a Flemish geographer. Marlowe couldn’t afford the book, but that didn’t matter: Cambridge had two copies.

How could Shakespeare compete with Marlowe? He didn’t have access to a vast academic library or the prestige that came with a university education. (In 1592, the playwright Robert Greene castigated Shakespeare for being an uneducated “up-start crow.”) Instead of translating ancient Roman poetry at Cambridge, Shakespeare had spent his formative years as an actor, learning the craft from the inside. He seemed destined to perform the lines of other men; he would never write anything that would last.

But Shakespeare was saved by his time. Thanks to a mixture of new institutions and policies, Elizabethan England proved to be the ideal place for a young dramatist to develop. It was, for one thing, an age obsessed with the theater: no society had ever been so eager to see plays performed on the stage. As a result, novice writers like Shakespeare were able to get work and gain experience.

And yet even as Londoners fl ocked to the playhouse, they were also pioneering a new kind of literary culture in which books became an important part of the public discourse. This is largely because sixteenth-century England underwent a massive increase in literacy — there hadn’t been this many readers in a city since ancient Athens. While historians estimate that less than 1 percent of English citizens could read in 1510, by the time Shakespeare moved to the capital, the literacy rate was approaching 50 percent.

This was not the case in other countries. A government survey of Catholic France, for instance, estimated that for the period from 1686 to 1690, more than 75 percent of the population could not sign their names. One explanation for these differences in literacy is the emphasis on textual interpretation in Prot-estant countries like England. Because the Reformation encouraged the masses to read, it also helped create a new market for books — more than seven thousand titles were published during the reign of Elizabeth. (By 1600, the neighborhood around Cov-ent Garden contained nearly one hundred independent publishers; residents complained that the streets reeked of ink.) The end result was a dramatic democratization of knowledge, and Shakespeare and his contemporaries gained access to a vast number of new stories and old texts. These playwrights didn’t need Cambridge or Oxford — they had the bookstore.