The shift from vacuum tubes to transistors gave McCarthy’s concept a boost, as did the development of user-friendly coding languages. But dividing up the computer’s computations into short micro-segments was still a challenging mechanical feat. McCarthy’s first demonstration didn’t go well: in front of an audience of potential customers, McCarthy’s mainframe ran out of memory and started spewing out error messages.3 Fortunately, the technical hurdles were soon overcome and, within a few years, computer operators were sitting at individual terminals in real-time “conversation” with their mainframes. By covertly breaking up digital processing, McCarthy initiated a revolution in the human-machine interface. Nowadays, as we follow driving directions on our phone, our handheld device draws on the processing power of numerous servers, each toggling rapidly between millions of users – McCarthy’s concept writ large in the cloud.
As with time, the brain can break up the visual world into fragments. David Hockney created his photo-collage The Crossword Puzzle using large tiles that overlap and collide.
In pointillism, scenes are built from dots that are smaller and more numerous.
George Seurat’s Un dimanche après-midi à l’île de la Grande Jatte
In digital pixilation, the dots are so small you normally don’t see them. This covert fracturing is the innovation that gives rise to our whole digital universe.
The idea of pixilation – breaking a whole into tiny parts – has a long history. When we “cc” an email, we are employing a skeuomorph from the analog age: carbon copy. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, an author would clone a document by first placing a sheet of black or blue carbonic paper between two sheets of plain paper; then, by writing or typing on the top sheet, dry ink or pigment would be transferred to the lower one, creating a duplicate. But the carbon sheets were messy; it was hard to handle them without getting everything dirty. In the 1950s, inventors Barrett Green and Lowell Schleicher came up with a way to solve the problem. They broke the concept of the sheet into hundreds of smaller areas, inventing the technique of micro-encapsulation. This way, as a person wrote on the sheet, individual ink capsules would burst, turning the sheet below blue.4 Although it would still be called a “carbon copy,” Green and Schleicher had created a user-friendly alternative to carbon paper: no matter where the pencil or typewriter key made its impression, ink would flow. Decades later, photocopying spelled the end of carbonless paper, but Green and Schleicher’s micro-encapsulation technique lived on in time-release medications and liquid crystal displays. For instance, instead of a solid pill, the 1960s decongestant Contac consisted of a gelatin capsule packed with more than six hundred “tiny time pills” that were digested at different rates. Likewise, instead of a solid sheet of glass, today’s LCD televisions segment the screen into millions of densely arranged microscopic crystals. Things that were once thought to be whole and indivisible turned out to be breakable into smaller parts.
Breaking comes so naturally to us that we hardly notice the many ways it is reflected in how we write and speak. We whittle away at words to speed up communication, shortening “gymnasium,” for example, (from the Greek gymnazein, meaning to train in the nude) into “gym” (and a less liberal dress code).5 We remove letters and phrases to create acronyms such as FBI, CIA, WHO, EU and UN. We tweet F2F for face-to-face, OH for overheard, and BFN for bye for now.
Our ease with these kinds of acronyms demonstrates how much brains like compression: we’re good at breaking things down, keeping the best bits, and still understanding the point. This is why our language is full of synecdoche, in which a part stands for a larger whole. When we talk about “the face that launched a thousand ships,” we obviously mean all of Helen, not just her visage – but we can break her down to a fragment without losing the meaning. This is why we describe your vehicle as your “wheels,” tally the number of people with a “head count,” or ask for someone’s “hand” in marriage. We talk about “suits” to represent businessmen, and “gray beards” to represent older executives.
This same sort of compression is characteristic of human thinking in general. Consider these sculptures in the port city of Marseilles, France: the visual analogs of synecdoche.
Bruno Catalano’s Les Voyageurs
Once the brain has the revelation that a whole can be broken into parts, new properties can emerge. David Fisher’s “Dynamic Architecture” breaks apart the usually solid frame of a building and, using motors similar to those in revolving restaurants, allows every floor to move independently. The result is a building that morphs its appearance. Floors can be choreographed individually or as an ensemble, adding an ever-changing facade to the city skyline. Thanks to our neural talent for breaking things apart, pieces that were once unified can become unglued.
As with dynamic architecture, one of classical music’s great innovations was to break musical phrases into smaller bits. Take as an example Johann Sebastian Bach’s Fugue in D-Major from The Well-Tempered Clavier. Here is the main theme:
Don’t worry if you can’t read music. The point is that later in the movement Bach snaps his theme in two: he discards the first half and concentrates only on the final four notes highlighted in red. In the passage below, overlapping versions of this tail appear thirteen times to produce a rapid, beautiful mosaic of fragments.
This kind of breakage gave composers like Bach a flexibility not found in folk songs such as lullabies and ballads. Rather than repeating the entire theme over and over, this shattering allowed him to write a packed multiplicity of theme-fragments in short order, creating something like the movie montages in Citizen Kane or Rocky IV. Given the power of this innovation, much of Bach’s work involved introducing themes and then breaking them apart.
Often the revelation that a whole can be broken up allows some parts to be scooped out and discarded. For his installation piece Super Mario Clouds, the artist Cory Arcangel hacked into the computer game Super Mario Brothers and removed everything but the clouds. He then projected what remained onto large screens. Visitors circulated among the exhibit, watching magnified cartoon clouds floating peacefully on the screen.
And the brain’s technique of omitting some pieces and keeping others leads often to technological innovations.
Late in the nineteenth century, farmers got the idea of replacing horses with a steam engine. Their first tractors didn’t work so well, however: they were essentially street locomotives, and the machinery was so heavy that it compressed the soil and ruined the crops. Switching from steam to gas power helped, but the tractors were still cumbersome and hard to steer.
A nineteenth-century steam tractor
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