Big picture and details

Information architecture looks to simplify the complex, but nothing in what an IA does discounts data. Instead, if you are focusing on IA (e.g., not a glancing part of the work), we integrate information. We are looking for truth, and then figuring out how to bubble up that truth through information, pathways, and the data that supports it.

Part of what I do is continuous recalibration: big picture and details, and several intermediary steps that fill out and get put aside as the truthiness of them solidifies or disintegrates or becomes out of scope for a particular project. I learned how to do this with art. As a painter and a sculptor, I would take several steps back, view a piece from multiple angles, and then come back to the details. It was to ensure the balance was what I was aiming, and not what I wished was happening.

The details count. Their patterns reflect and integrate a work of art, just as data does for information. And the big picture counts. All the details can be perfect up close, but if the whole doesn’t balance and flow, it doesn’t. For art and information, balance and flow can make or break the whole.

Example

I dug below the headlines from two different news agencies — the New York Times and The Washington Post. Remember, both of these headlines were reflective of someone else’s decision to bring information to my attention: they were bubbled up, I didn’t go searching in the depths of the publications to find them. And writers spent the time and effort to make sense of the stories before they could be written or published.

On the surface they are not the same subject.

Yet they are.

These are the two articles. One is a big-picture. The other looks at how an individual company is using behavioral pressures to negatively impact the finances and very lives of individuals.

Why It Seems Everything We Knew About the Global Economy Is No Longer True

Lexi Rizzo fought to unionize her Starbucks. Now she’s out of a job. Her struggle is just beginning.

The big-picture article defines multiple ways that our models and the global economy are currently mismatched. It shows the human fallout on mass scales. It is heartbreaking on several fronts, and I urge you to read it through, multiple times.

Starbucks is lauded as a solid business enterprise. They’ve figured out their corner of a complex system so well that they factor into the global economy; overall those metrics look like they have their shit together. Stockholders invest in Starbucks for this reason alone.

These financial numbers are strata-based signs of the underlying data. That data can be manipulated through behavioral pressures that won’t show up in the number because we don’t (currently?) encapsulate it in a meaningful, decoupled-yet-still-connected way. The numbers we use are predicated on actions taken and outcomes — clicks and ROI and profit. Strife, patterns of manipulation, anguish, etc., are left to narrative elements that are often gaslighted into nonsense and individual weakness; those impressed behaviors are leveraged to bolster the primary defining number: money.

I invite you to think about the construct of our economic system through the lens of data strata, systems, and human behavior. Consider each of the dots (nodes) below as a group of people, incorporating a full spectrum of all of our behaviors. Lines are representative of formalized connections, but mentally think of each dots as potentially connected to every other dot informally. More about information structures can be found here.

Data strata

Every single human being on the planet contributes to the global economy. As we think about our economic system understanding, the difference between each human life and Starbucks is difference of how the information is compounded and available to correlate into outcomes.

Individuals’ patterns have to compound with other to form and make patterns when we are thinking in a strata-designed information dimension. Understanding what patterns to focus on for interpretation and meaning is an ongoing study of a vast array of our knowledge chunks: sociology, biology, psychology, anthropology, etc. For this piece, I’m going to ignore — foolishly, but the problems are too big — the way data is being individually tracked and used by marketing. The data sea is vast, the interpretation models are innumerable, and the interpretations and meanings are both shifting and moribund depending on both individuals and the groups they form alliances with. That’s how we get differing interpretations around abortion, LGBTQ, government formation processes, etc. It’s complicated because it’s human, and it’s information, and they are an intertwingled system — but more on that in the next section.

So when we think of economy as a strata structure, we are already focusing on a comparably narrow field of study: economics. Starbucks, in a strata-informed version of looking at data, is simply a defining force that are themselves lost as a named entity in high-enough strata. They are an organizational point of reference, orchestrating the moving and sharing of specific goods, services, and abstractions. The overall knowledge base of economics focuses on the abstraction of money and the next few levels of details of what translates into money.

What strata does is chunk information into reasonable (with education) interpretive areas. It doesn’t completely decouple from the underlying details. Instead, it depends on informed patterns providing meaning of what is happening in those underlying details to form big-enough brushstrokes to invoke a sense of change. That sense can be oriented to the past or the future. Through time, it can show trends like an unexpected imbalance, defined progress that is being achieved or failing, or a forecast of where the data will likely shift and towards what. All of these things (and more) inform decisions that will impact those metrics in the future, in a continuous process of large-scale pattern evolution and problem solving.

In other words, strata — and economics, as an information structure designed with strata as the primary structure — is a dimensional connectome that pulls big-picture out of details, while trying to limit the overwhelm that individually integrating billions of details would surely produce. Strata are agnostic of the interior information structures.

That agnostic quality is important. It means that if we develop different interpretive patterns and build new metrics, all we have to do is make sure the data is documented to support them. We don’t have to trash what’s already there.

Systems

There are actually two big systems involved in these two articles. One is the global system supporting the movement of products and services, the other is the influence people and information have on each other.

The New York Times article articulates the global system well enough for this example.

One of the most fundamental systems of our existence is information and human behavior. They are inextricably linked. There are so many complex factors that go in to our individual perception of information: we literally cannot take in every data point as we walk down the street. Yet as information pathways are contained to keep us from a sense of continuous overwhelm, we are building interpretation and meaning without a full ingestion of reality. We pick our information pathways through complex problem solving based on historical success, mimicked behavior, and novel ideas.

That’s just perception.

Information and human behavior only get more intertwingled from there. They are intertwingled to the point where it’s recognized like air: ever present. Air is changeable. Just wait a bit for the weather or a fan or a moving being to produce a breeze to remind you that air exists. It’s also not something we generally pay attention to…until we do, like with pollution, which can feel overwhelming because of the ever-presence of its medium, air. If the change to air is that it’s gone from a contained space we currently inhabit, we’ll likely die before we can troubleshoot. It’s everything, and without it we stop existing.

Information is very similar. It’s everything. It doesn’t fully leave our individual existence until we’re dead. Information and human behavior both impact the other and create a push/pull that can shift both into a new balance, so it’s a system rather than a network.

Systems flex until they don’t, and then they have a series of cascading failures until something like an information-based series of firebreaks contains it or it just loses it’s momentum. Then the system rebalances.

We have this pervasive idea in our culture that numbers don’t lie. And they don’t, but the ones we leverage also don’t tell the whole truth.

Instead we depend on an idea of the system rebalancing itself as “tea leaves” that behavior has gone wrong. It’s why we assume that truly “bad” behavior will show up in the money, from macro to micro: despotic governments would be overthrown by the starving masses, evil corporations would implode, individuals would make their living as “no better than they ought to be”. We seem to forget that human behavior is complex, multi-faceted, and interactive. Furthermore, to put so much evidence in money is disregarding the fact that money is not a shared commodity in our current culture, but deeply divided. A few hold more than the rest of us combined, and so money itself has become a behavioral leverage point.

Human behavior

I look at the behavior noted in Starbuck’s union-busting manipulations, and I see behaviors of the dark triad. Covert and overt put-downs, a double-whammy of attacking an individual’s self-esteem and setting a stage for mimicry and social emphasis. Gaslighting focused on shaming, punishment, and emotional invalidation. Nitpicking and goalpost moving. If I looked more deeply, I could probably find more; but I can only take so much of the abuse of our dark triad behavior, even in third person. Currently we only have narrative to tell this story and show the patterns, and narrative can be twisted.

Some of these behaviors we use to get individuals working as a group, when they are used honestly. Some of them are used on a global scale to try to get places like Iran to toe a line — with a group (United Nations) deciding. We could focus on the idea that it’s in the composite that the behaviors become damning.

But the flip sides of how to show this has to be considered, too. Honesty can be a hard thing to triangulate, and proving malicious intent is a difficult case in the courts. If a group decision became a defining factor, every corporation out there would hide behind the group decision of their board. If we define a certain composite, a smart individual / corporation / government will go right up to the edge, and then back off — but it would likely still be a useful manipulation for a segment of the population.

Take it all together, and it means there are no easy answers based on outcomes and defined actions, yet the thinking and decision making at the root of behavior is hard to prove.

When we define an action as a sign of intrinsic badness, it can be weaponized — look towards the LGBTQ scenario, or our fights around abortion. In both of those instances, we’ve lost track of the initial reasoning, and our culture generationally pushed a simple narrative of good/bad. For generations the actions were weaponized: even a whiff of it could be enough of a reason to shame, shun, disenfranchise, and even kill. It’s been proven to be a false narrative that these actions or behaviors means the person is evil, yet a certain portion of us can’t let go of the simplicity of the definition and still leverage the weaponization of it.

Pull it all together

When system failures become cascading, there will be fallout. Bankruptcy is a light form; starvation a heavy form; war is even a possibility. We can avoid violence, but it would mean that those who have found their way to power with particular tools will have to give them up. There have to be enough who want to behave with a new standard to force the hands of those who want to operate business as usual, and a real democracy to make it happen.

Regulations and laws have a dark side: they can concretize false narratives of good/bad based on what in the future will be seen as arbitrary characteristics, like with LGBTQ rights. Regulations can also be hijacked to actively control morality plays, like what is happening with our abortion rights right now.

Here’s the really fucked up thing: free market capitalism — where there are no regulations, and chasing the money can be the only containing and relevant data factor — will still leverage behavioral manipulations to get what they want. They will bully competitors, gaslight the public, create militias to “protect” their avocados while terrorizing and bullying the communities around them (watch Rotten on Netflix for an overview of these practices and more).

Continuing to use people as an extractive element of profit is not going to end well for anyone. Using anything as an extractive — as opposed to sustainable — element of profit is literally eating a corner of existence with the belief that another corner of existence is over the horizon. With people that means a younger generation, ripe for using. With the environment, it means decimating one corner and moving on with the assumption it will rebound for another extraction later.

We, as a species, are no longer playing in fractional areas of the world. One or two extract, and a few more will come in behind them to work the margins, until a corner of the system can’t rebound. Multiple (and increasing) entities are extracting; production has become easier and quicker. There’s no horizon with greener pastures. There’s just our one, tiny, intertwingled and friable world.

These are micro interactions, forming a pattern, crossing chunked information (people, crops, land, water, air, and more), and forming a macro pattern. That macro pattern is so broadly involved in the details that our models no longer make sense of the world.

The details count. The individual lives count. Balance is not a nice-to-have, but an imperative. It needs to balance in the whole information structure, no matter how complex and ambiguous it is.

To do this we actually have to acknowledge and leverage more of the intertwingled information. We can’t keep it simple. We have to form functional feedback connectomes, which might borrow from older social norms, possibly ones colonial mindsets tried to eradicate. We’d be adding new understanding, and creating new informational patterns for interpretation and meaning. We’d be changing how we understand the world, and that is a terrifying prospect for a great many people.

Eventually, we’ll have to do it again. And again, probably ad infinitum. Our reality is complex, everything is connected, everything changes, and nothing — nothing — is as simple as we want it to be. Yet we cannot stop living until we understand the universe; instead, we have to muddle along as best we can.

The people on the ground, in the most nuanced of the data, are who can best tell us what is working and what is not. Any information structures we create to organize the whole and share information cannot impose reality from the top down and believe that it models an inclusive reality. The detail imposes reality on the construct, and the construct is there to help us make sense and share understanding.

Everything is connected. If there are no people — no employees, no customers, no leaders, and no governing bodies — there is no business.