|
December 5, 2003 Diagraming a conspiracy
Futurist Andrew Zolli, on his Z+Partners blog, writes that he recently saw a retrospective on the work of the late artist Mark Lombardi. Lombardi produced incredibly detailed diagrams showing the complex, connective webs of relationships between the players in various scandals such at the Iran-Contra affair. They look like a tangle of highways spanning a globe.
 |
|
Next News: Today's exploration of science and technology
Archive: A comprehensive listing of Next News columns
|
 |
|
Zolli writes that the diagrams—constructed by hand with use of thousands of notecards—"suggest certain structural truths about conspiracies and scandals.... For one thing, scale is apparently ‘beneficial’—in the sense that the larger the web of connections comprising the enterprise, the less any one participant has to know and the less each participant is exposed. In very large conspiracies, the criminal behavior emerges more from the pattern and less from individual transactions or behaviors. The result is a conspiracy that can ‘hide’ in plain sight, with individual criminality diluted to the point of invisibility.... What does it mean that such diagrams can be made, that the information needed to construct them is increasingly available in easily accessible public sources? Will the nature of future conspiracies change as a result?"
# posted by James M. Pethokoukis at 2:00 PM EST
 Return to Next News
| 
