Then he upset the system’s harmony. First he took twenty pieces off the board at random, then he filled five of the empty spaces, also at random, with white or black pieces. After this random scrambling, at least a few pieces tended to be isolated from their own kind, so the people they represented, according to Schelling’s rules, became unhappy. These people would then move closer to their own kind, thereby often isolating others and forcing them to move, too.
You can try this with your own chessboard.26 The result is fascinating. Remember that the residents were happy enough in a totally integrated town (the starting point), yet, when some people move randomly the end result is that the white pieces cluster together and so do the black. Eventually, more or less total segregation ensues.
Happily, in most places in the real world, people are more tolerant than Schelling’s code suggests, and variety persists. Nevertheless, it is a compelling illustration of how we tend to mix with those of our own ilk, and how even mild preferences can result in clustering of similar people. Recall Stanley Milgram’s small-world experiments–the question he was trying to answer was whether the world comprised largely unconnected, separate clumps of homogeneous social structure, or whether everyone in the world was connected to everyone else. It is reasonable to guess that Schelling would have placed his bet on the former, depressing theory.
If so, he would have lost his bet; but that in no way invalidates his model or the truth it approximates in real life. The tendency identified by Schelling exists. In fact, it is omnipresent–people are clannish and cliquey, often with unpleasant results. Only one thing overturns the Schelling tendency–the presence of superconnectors who link dissimilar groups. The superconnectors are a thin slice of humanity, yet they link us all together, making connections that otherwise would not exist. Without them, we would be plunged back into tribal enclaves, and life would be perilous, oppressive and poor.
Yet, life can be rich and free because superconnectors bridge the divisions in our world. But their influence doesn’t end here. Personal opportunity often flows from a type of superconnector we have not yet described, one who is not particularly bothered about connecting people in the usual ways.
No plants, animals or insects live here, but in late August a naked lady with dragonfly wings might ride by on her bicycle.
We are in one of the largest completely flat places on earth: the empty, dimensionless Black Rock Desert in Nevada. Seared by the intense sun, temperatures rise above 110 degrees Fahrenheit, yet they can be near freezing at night. The cracked surface of the playa breaks easily into a fine powder, making a gluey, intractable mud when it rains and a choking fog when the dust storms sweep in.
Around fifty thousand people journey to this elemental Mecca at the end of August; they come in cars, campervans, trailers and buses. Construction begins immediately on shelters against the sun and wind, a temporary encampment that is Nevada’s third-largest city for its fleeting existence. Art and apparition, on an apparently impossible scale, soar up from the desert floor, constructed of wood and scrap metal, but rendered eerie and ethereal by light and fire at night. There are bizarre costumes, spontaneous performances, trippy raves. Multicoloured mutant vehicles–‘art cars’–prowl at walking pace; wacky games and pagan rituals play out; proportion is distorted, and convention challenged, at every turn. The week is a collective art party of deeply alternative reality, an altar of wild expression. The festival climaxes with the burning of a giant wooden man, a glittering beacon against the desert sky, the prehistoric image of humans huddling around a fire fused with contemporary confidence in unbounded possibility.
The roots of the Burning Man Festival, now the largest counter-culture event in North America, can be traced back to 1986 and a group of friends on Baker Beach, San Francisco. Larry Harvey and four pals–all with links to the city’s underground art scene–held a bonfire featuring the burning of an eight-foot wooden effigy. As the event gained popularity and moved to the desert, Harvey and his friends created the set of magnetic ideas and practical organisation that has made Burning Man a cultural phenomenon.
A consistent thread of community, nature, fire, participation and freedom runs through the event. There’s no profit motive, and no commerce except the sale of tickets, ice and coffee–the economy functions largely on gifting and volunteering. Everyone extends a helping hand. Dogs, guns, regular vehicles and mobile phones are banned. When it’s over, the city vanishes without trace. Behind the scenes, there is a largely volunteer organisation that works for months in advance to pull it off. Many of the giant art pieces take a year or more to construct off-site.
Most people who attend are inspired by the event, sometimes permanently changed. They’ve been part of a huge experiment that temporarily rewrites the rules of society, and puts the way things are in a new light. Many feel it’s the most free place they’ve ever been. And, undoubtedly, Burning Man is an extraordinary superconnecting structure, marking people with a shared, provocative, often spiritual experience carved out of a hostile environment. Harvey and his friends may struggle to maintain the purity of the Burning Man movement as it expands; but whatever happens next, they have already created an amazing new arena for deep human connection.
Superconnectors, then, may do more than link everyone within an existing world or bridge diverse worlds. The most creative of them may also bring people together in a completely new world. Burning Man is a perfect example of how the creation of weak links between strangers can lead to the formation of a wholly new hub. As an eight-day event once a year, run largely by volunteers, Burning Man is quite unlike conventional hubs, most obviously in structure, but also in results–while encouraging collaboration, the festival adds more to the freedom of participants than it takes away. Yet, Burning Man confronts us with the paradox that the most powerful and appealing acts of personal connection, however anarchic, need some form of group structure to maximise and perpetuate the individual connections. We’ll find in the next chapter that hubs, though often in tension with weak links, are necessary complements to them; that progress has always come from our ability to work together in groups.
We’ve seen that there can be some pretty unlikely superconnectors out there; many are surprisingly normal, down-to-earth, fully paid-up members of the human race. But still, there are some mathematical laws we’ll examine later which suggest that the great majority of human connection is the work of a small minority. We are all linked, not because we share the work of connecting in roughly equal proportions, but because a few people, like Mr Jacobs in Sharon, are so good at connecting that they do most of it for us.
But even if we are not superconnectors and never will be, we should not sit back and let the likes of Mr Jacobs do all the work. We can expand our repertoire of weak links and make them more useful by connecting other people more intelligently and more often. We can identify the superconnectors around us, and make more use of their networks–remember, superconnectors (with the odd exception such as Bruce Henderson) tend to be open and accessible. And we can choose the groups we join much more carefully, and consider leaving them when they hold us back.