There is a secret zoo that runs encaged along the roads.
They are liquid, semi-visible goliaths that rage through the streams and chunks of ordinary traffic, with the effervescent tendrils of mile-long tales whipping behind them like Chinese dragons. Though composed of hundreds of pounds of steel, glass and plastic, they are able to pass through solid objects. They are bound by the laws of the highway, but not by any conventional notion of time or space.
They are Aggregate Traffic Animals: a menagerie of emergent beasts drawn from the interacting behaviours of many individual human beings driving many individual cars with many individual goals, their collective activity giving rise to something with greater presence, power and purpose than the sum of its constituents. They take on a host of different forms, each to serve a different end.
They are real, and they drive among us.
Preamble
In his introduction to The Extended Phenotype (Oxford University Press, 1982) enthusiastic evolutionary biology cheerleader and Commodore-hacking pop-science guru Richard Dawkins invites us to consider the Necker Cube Illusion: a two-dimensional image representing two interlocked three-dimensional blocks in which the foreground and background can seem to flip back and forth as the brain fruitlessly seeks the "true" interpretation of the depicted space. This is Dawkins' starting point for a thought experiment in which he blurs the lines between species, their genes and the environment, calling into question the traditional boundaries drawn through biological systems to identify the relevant level of study. To wit, to wank:
We look at life and begin by seeing a collection of interacting individual organisms. We know that they contain smaller units, and we know that they are, in turn, parts of larger composite units, but we fix our gaze on the whole organisms. Then suddenly the image flips. The individual bodies are still there; they have not moved, but they seem to have gone transparent...
In other words, if you are able to de-emphasise the organism itself you are free to appreciate the idea of beaver ponds as artificial lakes generated by beaver genes, or to see a spider's web as an arrangement of silk drawn by DNA. By extending the lines with which we bound the traditional phenotype, we define new organisms, merging technology and individuals into communities the same way that ancient micro-organisms interacting inside bilipid membranes fell into symbiotic lockstep dances to found the first stable cells.
Organelles, cells, bodies, herds: at which level we discern the animal is purely a matter of focus.
This idea of the emergent animal or "super-organism" is hardly particular to Dawkins: William Morton Wheeler remarked on the idea in his 1911 paper "The Ant Colony as an Organism" in a treatment that is every bit as cogent but with considerably less otaku chic than Kevin Kelly's printed-soundbyte manifesto on hive complexity, Out of Control (Perseus Books, 1994). In the words of Kelly:
There is nothing to be found in a beehive that is not submerged in a bee. And yet you can search a bee forever with cyclotron and fluoroscope, and you will never find a hive.
So too can you examine a driver in a car and know nothing about the greater animal in which they both participate when the circumstances are right. Some of the applicable forces can be seen most clearly in the rarified environment of the professional race course, as explored by David Ronfeldt, a senior social scientist at RAND, in his 2002 paper Social science at 190 MPH on NASCAR's Biggest Superspeedways, where fleeting moments of co-operation between rivals are necessary in order to win. Ronfeldt focuses in particular on the phenomenon of draft line formation, which is similar to the way flocking birds can share aerodynamic advantage. Like iron filings in a magnetic field, the large-scale distribution of opportunistically partnering cars are drawn into predictable macro-scale patterns across the speedway:
Once the racers sort themselves out - after ten to twenty laps - it is common to see a single draft line of four to seven cars running in front, pursued a hundred or so yards back by a second line of cars, all another hundred or so yards ahead of a large pack of cars that may still be running in parallel lines but are doing more dicing than drafting...Cars that run alone, often stuck dangerously between two draft lines, will appear to drift irrevocably backward.
Fre
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