Migrating the Machine Metaphor

Metaphors are packaged and explained to middle schoolers everywhere as one of many rhetorical devices in the poet’s toolbox.

Life is a dance. Life is a battle. Life is a box of chocolates. yadda yadda.

But metaphors are much more than linguistic expressions. They are the ordering frameworks of our conceptual systems.

In their recent book Metapohors We Live By, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson do a good job of arguing the cultural weight of metaphors:

The most important claim we have made so far is that metaphor is not just a matter of language, that is, of mere words. We shall argue that, on the contrary, human thought processes are largely metaphorical. This is what we mean when we say that the human conceptual system is metaphorically structured and defined. Metaphors as linguistic expressions are possible precisely because there are metaphors in a person’s conceptual system.

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Lately I’ve been thinking about something: the potential migration away from the machine metaphor to explain human organizations and bureaucracy.

And how the Internet is driving this migration.

Although a machine itself, the Internet is unlike any machine we have ever seen. Never before has a machine been so wide-spread, adaptable, and invasive. Never before has a machine penetrated and mediated human activity to the extent the Internet has.

Increasingly, I think we are going to need to look to natural systems to contextualize and conceptualize what we are seeing.

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This quote – which is over one hundred years old – still holds water:

Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.

Such are the differences among human beings in their sources of pleasure, their susceptibilities of pain, and the operation on them of different physical and moral agencies, that unless there is a corresponding diversity in their modes of life, they neither obtain their fair share of happiness, nor grow up to the mental, moral, and aesthetic stature of which their nature is capable.

-John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859)

Human nature as a tree…I think Mill was onto something.

We are already seeing nature supply metaphors for the Internet in the language of ‘World Wide Web,’ ‘Cloud Computing,’ the ‘Hive Mind,’ and Wikipedia’s ‘Self-healing.’

If humans can increasingly base their metaphors on natural systems, I am hoping the collateral effect will be a new respect for nature and a restoration of our proper place in the ecosystem, as direct participants, not as outside actors.

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