> I use the personal jargon “tiling structure” or “tiling system” to describe a system that causes itself to be replicated, tiling the world with copies of itself. Some tiling structures are biological; humans are a tiling structure, tiling all continents with copies of the same kind of naked primate. Some are technological; agriculture tiled the world with itself not by making humans healthier, taller, or less prone to famine, but by producing sheer numbers and densities of miserable people for thousands of years so effectively (despite all the famines) that other options for subsistence were tiled out of existence.
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> Tiling structures are one explanation for why urban design looks so uniform (and so soul-crushingly ugly) throughout the United States. Certain forms are ubiquitous because they solve certain delineated problems effectively enough to become effectively mandatory: power lines, big box retail, strip malls, freeways, parking lots, and billboards are such powerful patterns that few locales can refuse them, despite their ugliness and the constraints they impose..
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> Some tiling structures are “top down,” like government education: imposed on sub-entities against their will. Others are “bottom up” – a design problem is solved in such a way that all later actors adopt it, and it gradually becomes just as mandatory and constraining as a top-down imposed pattern. The blogger Viznut examines this latter dynamic with respect to software development; instead of attempting to solve problems by refactoring from scratch and “cutting reality at the joints,” pre-existing chunks are adopted and glued together to form a monstrosity that just barely works and is riddled with misfit:
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>>>Tell a bunch of average software developers to design a sailship. They will do a web search for available modules. They will pick a wind power module and an electric engine module, which will be attached to some kind of a floating module. When someone mentions aero- or hydrodynamics, the group will respond by saying that elementary physics is a far too specialized area, and it is cheaper and more straight-forward to just combine pre-existing modules and pray that the combination will work sufficiently well.
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>>>Viznut, The Resource Leak Bug of Our Civilization
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> Whether or not this is a fair description of software developers, I think it is an accurate description of how people build their lives. We select from the available chunks and try to fit them together into a coherent whole – an education here, a job there, a box to live in, entertainment to pass the time. These available “life parts” tend to be black boxes in whose design we have little say. They may not fit together into a satisfying whole at all – the boat they make may not float. Perfectly adequate material solutions fail to provide essential “nutrients” – sometimes literally (as with obesity), sometimes figuratively (sunshine, eye contact, exercise). It is tempting to accuse a person who cannot make a coherent life out of the available parts of having too little imagination; however, I do not think this kind of problem is one that individual imagination is powerful enough to solve. Even the most imaginative among us will tend to build a “monstrosity” instead of a life
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