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After the Stall
grammers contribute—culture, political, social, economic, and literary. We
can call this recursive generativity, repeated up through the layers of the hourglass.
Generativity at the technical layer can also enable new forms of group interaction,
refuting Mill’s dichotomy of the mediocre masses versus the lone eccentric.
GROUPS AND GENERATIVITY: FROM GENERATIVE TOOLS TO
GENERATIVE SYSTEMS
Creative talent differs greatly from one person to the next, not only in degree
but in preferred outlet. Mozart might have turned to painting if there were no
musical instruments for which to compose, but there is no particular reason to
believe that his paintings would be as good among the work of painters as his
music is judged to be among that of musicians. Generativity solicits invention,
which in turn can be an important expression of the inventor—a fulfillment of
a human urge that is thought to represent some of the highest endeavor and
purpose of which we are capable. New technologies welcome new groups of
people who may excel at manipulating them.
People can work alone or in groups. Working in groups has practical limitations.
It is typically not easy to collaborate from far away. The combination of
networks and PCs, however, has made it particularly easy to arrange such collaborations.
Open source projects too ambitious for a single programmer or
localized group of programmers to achieve alone have been made possible by
cheap networking, 73 and the free software movement has developed tools that
greatly ease collaboration over a distance, such as CVS, the “concurrent versions
system.” 74 CVS automates many of the difficult tasks inherent in having
many people work on the same body of code at the same time. Itself an open
source project, CVS permits users to establish a virtual library of the code they
are working on, checking out various pieces to work on and then checking
them back in for others to use. 75 Successive versions are maintained so that
changes by one person that are regretted by another can be readily unmade.
People with complementary talents who otherwise would not have known or
met each other, much less found a way to collaborate without much logistical
friction, can be brought together to work on a project. Creativity, then, is enhanced
not only for individuals, but also for groups as distinct entities, thanks
to the linkage of the PC and the Internet.