The Ghost Map | Steven Johnson | Talks at Google

I wanted to say first off, thank you to you all because I write these kind of multidisciplinary books and Ghost Map is a book that in part for reasons I'll talk about today. Ghost Map is a book that crosses a lot of different disciplinary lines. It talks about the life cycles of bacteria, it talks about urban history, it talks about disease patterns and epidemiology and cartography and the history of London. And it's the kind of book that would have been just extraordinarily more difficult to write without Google. I mean I really, I can't imagine doing it in under. You know, I wrote it in about two years and I think it would have taken me five or six years to do it in the kind of pre Google era. So I'm going to share my royalties with you all. Thank you very much for. And the other thing that's funny about this book, in terms of my kind of evolution, Tyler mentioned Everything Bad is Good for you. The book I wrote right before the Ghost Map and for those of you who know it, it's a book about popular cult and why popular culture is making us smarter, not dumbing us down and why it's getting more and more complex. And I went around the country talking about it a lot, gave a lot of speeches about it because it was a controversial book and people are kind of interested in this whole debate. And over time it kind of developed my Talk about Everything Bad Is Good for your into a little piece of kind of half stand up, half performance art with lots of kind of funny lines and things like that. And then I went from writing about video games to writing about 19th century cholera. The next logical step. And then once the book came out, started to give talks about the Ghost Map and it turns out that cholera is not as funny as some of these other ones. And I actually found myself doing in a couple cases, breakfast talks about cholera. And in general, people do not want to hear about diseases of the intestinal tract while they're eating breakfast. So fortunately no one seems to be dining right now. So that'll be good because I'm going to start by grossing you out. Anybody over there just stay away from the food for a few minutes. Here's what I want to do. I want to talk just briefly for a while about the overall story of the Ghost Map. The Ghost Map is the first book that I've written of the five that has a sustained narrative all the way through. And it really part of my kind of ambition for the book was to write an idea book that was wrapped around a story. All my other books have been largely kind of idea books, first and foremost, with little kind of micro stories in them along the way. And so really, it's a story of about kind of 10 days in the middle, arguably the most terrifying epidemic in the history of London. But it's also a story about what those 10 days mean to us today, how they change the world in a number of kind of crucial ways, and about the kind of the lessons that we can draw from what happened during that period. Because while they're kind of it's a terrifying story on a bunch of levels, it's also in a weird way, a story of hope, because the battle against cholera was ultimately kind of first won, or the first battle that was kind of successfully won by humans kind of started of this terrible week in London in 1854. So let's go back to London, 1854. It was an extraordinary time in the history of the city. London was not just the largest city in the world, it was the largest city the world had ever seen. It was about two and a half million people at that point. The closest city in number was Paris, was basically the only other city over a million people. And it had grown from about a million at the turn of the century. So it was on this extraordinary growth rate. And one of the things that's crucial to understand about this period is that there was a basic question about the long term viability of cities of this scale, kind of large scale, multimillion metropolitan centers. There were many, many smart, kind of reasonably minded people who looked at what was happening to London and said, this is not going to work out in the long run. This city is going to collapse. Rome had gotten to over a million people, you know, a millennium before, and it ultimately kind of collapsed under its own weight and had gone back to being a city of about 100,000 people. And there were a lot of very sensible people who looked at what London was like in 1850 and said, we're going to have that same fate befall us. One of the things that you found when you went to London is that it was. There was an extraordinary kind of scavenger class, about 100,000 people, the kind of Victorian homeless who had built out this elaborate system of literally living off the kind of refuse of the city. So there were people who lived in the sewers, just kind of walking through what were kind of the early prototype sewers. They didn't really have a real sewage system, which we'll get to in a second. But wading through the kind of waste and filth of the city, looking for stuff that might have been kind of accidentally kind of flushed into that world. And every now and then, the kind of pockets of like methane gas in these sewers would get too dense and they'd be walking with their kerosene lanterns and they would just blow up underground in a river of rock. Filth like that was life in the big city. And there was 100,000 of these scavengers. So if the scavengers had broken off at that point in time and formed their own city, they would have been like the fifth largest city in all of Britain. So it's just a huge class of folks who were there. The other thing about it is that basically all the kind of conventions that we now pretty much take for granted in developed cities around the world of public health infrastructure, of a waste removal infrastructure, of a clean water system, all that kind of stuff didn't exist. And in fact, there really wasn't a kind of a political system to have the jurisdiction to put those things in place. So the technology wasn't there and there wasn't an institutional presence to implement that technology. So what you had was basically a modern kind of industrial city living with an Elizabethan kind of public health and public waste removal, sanitation infrastructure. It was really kind of a disastrous consequence. And I'll just read you this one passage from Henry Mayhew from an article in the Guardian where he went back and revisited the site of a big cholera outbreak. And this is what he found. As we passed along the reeking banks of the sewer, the sun shone upon a narrow slip of the water. In the bright light, it appeared the color of strong green tea and positively look as solid as black marble in the shadow. Indeed, it was more like watery mud than muddy water. And yet we were assured this was the only water the wretched inhabitants had to drink. As we gazed in horror at it, we saw drains and sewers emptying their filthy contents into it. We saw a whole tier of doorless privies in the open road common to men and women built over it. We heard bucket after bucket of filth splashed into it. And the limbs of the vagrant boys bathing in it seemed by pure force of contrast, white as marble. This is the kind of stuff they left out of the Masterpiece Theater story of, you know, kind of London from this period, right? Although it is there in Dickens. I mean, if you go back and read Dickens in that period, it's all kind of captured in that same level of kind of excruciating detail. And we've kind of sentimentalized it and are telling of the story of what kind of London was like at this time point. Now, what all that filth created was one crucial fact, which was that London was an incredibly smelly place to live. It was just every account of coming to the city begins and ends with this account of just how unbelievably, you know, overpowering the stench was. It was partially the waste that was piling up. People had cesspools in their basements with, like, kind of two feet of waste just sitting there where they would dump their kind of filth in the mornings. And then you had an enormous amount of livestock living in the city. I mean, not just the horses, of course, but people would keep cows in their attics for milk, and they would just kind of lift them up there and keep them up in their attics until they died. And you had slaughterhouses in the middle of the city. And Also, until about 1860, London had more kind of heavy industry than Manchester did. Actually think of Manchester in the north as being the center of industry, but London had a lot of as well. So you had kind of industrial fumes. So the sea was just overpoweringly kind of noxious in the kind of the smell experience. And that led to, in a sense, one of the great medical mistakes of the last 200 to 300 years, which is central to the story that I tell in the Ghost Map. And that is the mistake of the miasma theory. And the miasma theory basically held that all diseases on some level, were coming from poisoned air and from the inhalation of some noxious kind of component in the air that was causing people to get sick. And the most famous kind of formulation of this was from Edwin Chadwick, who was one of the great public health crusaders of the period, who testified before Parliament in the late 1840s. All smell is disease. That was his kind of takeaway quote. Anytime there's a strong smell, overpowering, kind of offensive smell, that that's going to lead to disease. And so the early attempts to deal with the problems people were having in terms of kind of these runaway diseases, in terms of the experience of living in London, were all targeted at dealing with the smell. If you could get rid of the smell, you'd be able to solve the problems. So one of the first major public health initiatives, really, in the history of Western civilization was the nuisances act of 1848. And what they did was they said, one of the problems here is that people have these cesspools in their basements. And if we could get rid of those cesspools, get rid of the smells emanating from those cesspools, we'll deal with this problem, all these diseases that are plaguing our city. And so what they did was they built an elaborate system to get all the waste out of the cesspools and empty it into the thames, right? The main supply of drinking water for the entire city. What they didn't realize was that a number of the diseases, most notably among them cholera, were coming from contaminated water supplies and not from anything in the air. The air in London, in terms of kind of short term epidemic diseases, was actually not really killing anyone. It was killing a very small percentage of the people who were getting sick. And the vast majority of the kind of epidemic deaths that were, that were occurring in the 19th century were coming from a poisoned water supply. So the very first kind of the inaugural act of kind of a modern public health infrastructure, this nuisances act, was actually, I mean, a modern day bioterrorist could not come up with a more ingenious scheme to poison the water supply of a large metropolitan area. They took all the waste and poured it into the river. And so, in fact, the problem of cholera got much, much worse. Now, cholera had come to London first in the early 1830s after kind of slowly migrating up through the continent. And from 1830 on, for every kind of three or four or five years, there would be another big outbreak, and 20 or 30,000 people would die across England. 10,000 people would die in London, 20,000 people would die in London. So it was a major presence in people's lives, right? It was, you know, it was. The collar would come when people would leave the city, they would flee, and then they would kind of come back after things would stabilize. The problem got worse after the nuisances act, the river got more and more contaminated. And the problem seemed to be just, you know, you could wake up one morning, an outbreak would take off, and then suddenly, you know, 10,000 people in your city would be dead in the space of three or four weeks. So, you know, something, you know, there would be like three times a 9, 11 happening on a regular basis in a much smaller city again and again and again. And it was this kind of experience, experience that was leading people to think, okay, you know, we're not sure if this urban living, this metropolitan living is actually going to work out. That was, that was one of the key kind of arguments people were making about this kind of poisoned city that it was impossible for it to figure out a way to be a self sustaining proposition over time. So then we get to late summer, August 28, 1854, unusually hot August. And this is Soho in London. Soho is a very, very interesting neighborhood on a couple of levels. At that point in London history. It's been an interesting neighborhood for 400 years. It was the densest area in all of London in terms of the kind of concentration of people. It was also an island of kind of working class poverty in the middle of otherwise pretty posh neighborhoods. In fact, over here, just the end of Regent street, is the neighborhood of Mayfair, which is still to this day a very fancy neighborhood in London. And when you crossed over Regent street, you got into these very kind of small little alleyways. And in fact, if you go to London. And one of the things I've actually started to notice in kind of tracking what people are saying about ghost map is that people are starting to go on trips to London and visit the site of this outbreak. Having read the ghost map and so I'm seeing like their Flickr photo sets of like, hey, we're here at the ghost map outbreak spot. Which is pretty cool. So if you go, if you do that, if you take the cholera tour of London, one of the things you'll find and it's still there today is that as you walk around this part of Soho which is now this is Carnaby street. So it's filled with, you know, high end boutiques and shopping and everything like that. There's this giant Regent Street Avenue here, the Apple store is right here and lots of big shops and things like that. But what you feel is this very weird sense of like, I know there's a giant big main avenue here, but I can't quite get to it. Like all the kind of routes seem to be blocked to it. And there's an actual kind of social urban planning reason for that, which is that when John Nash built Regent street, they built it as a kind of port en sanitaire, separating the fancy neighborhood of Mayfair from this impoverished area of Soho. And so they basically blocked out these are very small little openings here. So they made sure that it would be very hard to get from, from the Knights area over into this kind of swamp here. And it's still there, built into the kind of the grid of the city today. And it's something you feel very powerfully as you walk around. Of course, the demographic profiles of Soho changed quite a bit. So you have this dense concentration and that is very much relevant to the story, because the outbreak that ends up kind of erupting here, one of the ways in which people kind of dismissed it is to say, well, that's where all the poor kind of morally corrupt people live. And the reason why it hasn't spread beyond that is because, you know, they're nicer. There's a nicer class of people who live over here on the other side of Regent Street. And so the, you know, the kind of physical layout of the city was crucial in the way that this story broke out. So on the morning of August 28, 1854, there was a family living in a house right here at 40 Broad street named the Lewis family. One of the things that is beautiful about writing the history of these kinds of stories is that we know an immense amount about the kind of day to day lives of the people living in this little world here, because it was documented so extensively after the outbreak. And so you get this little glimpse of people living through kind of ordinary life, being kind of interrupted by this extraordinary event. And it gives you a very different slant on, because normally when you kind of tell the history of kind of great men and women, of epic battles, of presidential races and assassinations and kings, those people are all kind of living very self consciously through kind of historical moments and experiences. And here you have this thing where everyday life in London in 1854 is suddenly interrupted by this terrible outbreak. And then all these little actions get documented. And so we have this little glimpse of what people were actually doing in a way that. That's pretty extraordinary. What was happening at 40 Broad street was the Lewis family, which is John Lewis and his wife and the little baby whose name we don't know, Baby Lewis, who was. I forgot now, I think it's something like six or seven months old. For reasons we don't entirely know, that the baby came down with cholera in the morning of the 28th. And the way in which cholera works, basically, without getting too gross, is basically all of the fluids in your body are kind of evacuated in a very short amount of time. It's a tedious way of dying because everything in your body is basically dependent on a supply of water to function. And in a sense, you have kind of massive failure and everything. It's very hard to pinpoint the exact cause because everything pretty much fails. Although your body plays this kind of hideous triage internally, where it reserves as much water as it can to keep your brain alive. And so people actually have a kind of remarkably acute sense of awareness of like their incredibly painful, imminent death. When they die of cholera, because their brain is kind of alive longer than the rest of their body, in a sense. And so what you have is this, you know, kind of massive evacuation of water and, you know, kind of intense, basically really intense diarrhea. And so the mother of this little baby is emptying out these kind of soaked diapers in the cesspool in the bottom of their house. And it turns out to give away a little bit of the ending, it turns out that right across the street, a few feet away from the bottom of their cesspool, Was a very popular well which had a pump on top of it that was the most popular watering hole in all of soho. It was kind of widely known to have the best public water in all the city. And so people would come from or in all of this area. So people would come from quite far away. In fact, sometimes even if they had pumps nearer to them, they would come to the broad street pump. And it turned out that there was a little bit of kind of decaying brickwork between the cesspool and the pump. And so the bacteria that causes cholera kind of leaked into the well. And within about two days, the most intensely concentrated outbreak of cholera erupted in this neighborhood over the weekend. Basically, you know, just an extraordinary number of people around the neighborhood started to die. And the stories of this, you know, it's a particularly hideous experience, not just because you're dying of cholera and the situation that I described, but you also have a number of cases of entire families in their little one room house, all dying together over the course of 24 to 48 hours. You had families who were just entirely wiped out because they'd all drunk water from this well. The neighborhood, by about the 8th or 10th day, was literally decimated. 10% of the population was dead in the space of 9 or 10 days. And far more would have died, actually, if so many people hadn't fled. After about the third day, people started to just bolt. So you had this, you know, kind of extraordinary scene of people being kind of carried down the street by the kind of cartload and all the doors shuttered up, and people just living in fear of this thing that they fundamentally didn't understand. In the middle of this was a nearby neighbor named John snow. John snow, in a sense, is one of the two heroes of this book. Snow was a classic 19th century character. He was a dabbler in a million different things. He's really one of the great scientific minds of the period. He was trained as kind of an ordinary doctor, and he worked among the poor of soho. He lived about 12, 13 blocks away from where the outbreak happened. And he. So he was treating the poor. He had developed a pioneering technique in delivering anesthesia, Basically ether and chloroform, in the late 1840s, just because he'd stumbled across this new technology. And he developed an interesting new gadget that would deliver it. He ended up becoming the leading anesthesiologist in london, in fact, delivered anesthesia to queen victoria for her, like, ninth kid. And so he was in this kind of interesting realm, Straddling, you know, kind of treating the queen and simultaneously working among the poor of soho. And he worked across a number of different disciplines. He was a founding member of the epidemiology society, when people were just figuring out what epidemiology Was going to be as a discipline. And he was an amateur photographer and just a dabbler in lots of different things. And at some point in the late 1840s, and there's an interesting question about why this happened, which we don't really know the answer to, he developed an interest in cholera, which we can understand, because it was one of the great medical riddles of the time. And within about six months, this is what we don't quite understand, how he got to this insight. He had hit upon the idea that the problem with cholera Was that it was infecting the water supply and it was not in the air, and that the authorities had it entirely wrong, and that if you could purify the water, you, would eliminate cholera from the start. And so with that theory, he then went around Trying to figure out ways to convince people. He published a bunch of papers in the lancet and a few other metaphors, journals at the time, which were basically ignored. And so he started doing these elaborate studies of cholera outbreaks and trying to figure out if there was a way he could show some unusual kind of statistical, you, know, pattern in the distribution of deaths and the distribution of clean water and impure water throughout the city. He did a number of different things, but nothing ever quite worked. And so he kind of continued to publish and continued to work on it, but basically, he was in this interesting kind of symbiotic relationship with the cholera bacteria itself, like he was waiting for an outbreak to come that would help improve his theory. And so in the last days of August in 1854, when he got word that just around the corner, There was this terrible outbreak Devastating the neighborhood, he immediately kind of recognized that there was a great opportunity there. And he went kind of into the belly of The Beast. And there's kind of this great scene of as everybody's fleeing, you know, kind of Jon Snow walks into the middle of the city, into the middle of this kind of, you know, devastated neighborhood, and he starts looking for water spots. And very quickly, he realizes this pump seems to be at the center of the whole thing. So he takes a little bit of water from it, tests the water. He doesn't have the ability to actually see the bacteria yet because of the limitations in microscopic technology of the time. And so he begins to realize that if he's going to solve this case and make the case, he's going to have to look at the pattern of deaths and illness around the pump and not just, you know, discover the disease agent itself in the water. And so he starts kind of knocking on doors. And what ensues is this kind of classic case of medical detective work. It's. Somebody described it to me as the Victorian csi. Basically, you have this kind of medical investigator going around and knocking on doors and asking people for information. And eventually, on about day seven, he convinces the authorities to take the handle off the pump. The story is sometimes kind of condensed in a way that makes it seem a little bit more climactic in the sense that sometimes people will say, you know, the authorities were won over by his waterborne theory of cholera. They removed the handle of the pump, and the epidemic ended right there. And John Snow saved the day. And if you get a chance to read the book, or if you read the book, you know that it's much more complicated than that. The authorities actually were not convinced at all, but they had no other idea what to do, and they were kind of helpless. So they said, well, we might as well do this, although we're not sure about this theory at all. The outbreak didn't, in fact, end immediately. It kind of took a few more days to peter out, and it probably was on the cycle of kind of burning itself out anyway. It's unclear what the. What the pump would have done, but it was a crucial moment in the sense that there was an actual institutional kind of intervention into an outbreak of cholera that was based on the waterborne theory for the first time, in a sense, as a breakthrough in the history of man's battle with disease and urban cities, battle with disease. It was a breakthrough event in that sense. But right as he was making this argument and convincing the authorities to take the pump handle off, his paths cross with, really, the other hero of this book, somebody who's been neglected in all the accounts of the broad street epidemic, for the most part. This amazing local curate, local priest, Henry Whitehead, who at the time was 26, this is much later in his life. I hope they look a little weathered there. And Whitehead was not a man of science by training at all, but he was a great kind of open minded thinker who had, like Snow, decided to devote his life working among the poor of London. And what Whitehead brought to the case something very crucial, which was he had a great social intelligence. He had great kind of social networks. He knew he was one of those kind of local vicars who knows everybody in the neighborhood is always coming over and having tea or drinking beer in the pub late at night. He was that kind of local vicar. And so he knew everybody and everybody knew him. And Snow didn't have kind of great kind of people skills. And when Whitehead heard that the pump was being kind of targeted as the culprit of this, of this terrible outbreak, his first reaction was, that's wrong. That's the best water in Soho. I know that because I live around the corner and I see everybody drinking it. I can disprove this theory. And so he went out and tried to basically show that in fact Snow had it wrong and started knocking on doors himself and actually got a of lot, lot more information than Snow did because he was able to kind of track down people who had left. Because he knew the people, he could send letters to them. When people came back, he was able to interview them. People were more willing to talk about their drinking habits and who had gone to the pump and who hadn't and so on. And so Whitehead ended up assembling a much bigger data set. And the more he looked, the more he realized that Snow was right. So eventually he kind of came around to Snow's theory. And then the two of them started to work together on this problem. And it became this kind of unlikely friendship between these two very different men. And in the months that followed, there were a couple of kind of public interventions of people trying to kind of, you know, send a commission down to figure out what had happened at Broad Street. And they were all driven by the kind of miasma theory. They were all told to analyze in excruciating detail all the smells in the neighborhood. I mean, they were literally going around and classifying, you know, was very smelly here and also over here, terribly smelly, you know, and nobody, you know, none of these people, the official investigators were told to spend any time thinking about the water or thinking about the waterborne theory as a potential explanation. So it was really Snow and Whitehead kind of on their own. And so they. They ended up. Snow ended up building to kind of make the case a map of the outbreak. He was trying to figure out how do you kind of visually represent what happened in a way that people kind of immediately intuitively understand? You could show them a big, long table of data, but that doesn't really work for people. Maybe there's a way of kind of representing this event in space that will make it more intelligible. And so we ended up creating a couple of maps. This is the last one. And this is one of the great documents in medical detective work, data mapping, cartography, which is a canonical thing. It shows up twice in Tufte's books, which is where I first came across it. In the first book, Tufte talks about it and gets literally everything wrong about the story. If you go back and read Tufte's first book, he shows the wrong map, actually shows a copy of this map that somebody else did. And he tells the story that Snow developed the theory of waterborne cholera from this outbreak. Rather than having the theory first, he doesn't mention Whitehead, all this kind of stuff. But in the second telling where he spends more time, he kind of went back and corrected the record. So this is what Snow did. Each black mark represents a death at this particular address. This is the pump here. And so you can see this heavy concentration of depth right around the pump, and you can see how it thins out as you get further and further and further away. Now, the other thing he did, so right there you see there's something wrong here. Something's fundamentally wrong in this area. But one of the objections that he anticipated would be that you could say that maybe there was something just really, really smelly here. And so what you would find is a kind of diffusion pattern of, like, it gets less smelly as you get further away. And so, you know, it's just that there's some miasma problem right here in this area, and that's why the deaths are concentrated there. And so to combat that, he did something very clever, which has been generally ignored in the discussion of this map, which is he created this little line here. And this is technically what you would call a Voronoi diagram. And what it is is it's an attempt to map, in a sense, pedestrian time in space. So inside this area is the zone where it was faster to walk to the Broad street pump than to any other pump around in the neighborhood. Given the kind of erratic patterns of the streets and the crossing, this Is the shape. It's not a direct circle because the streets are very irregular. So this is the shape of anybody living inside this zone of. Is closer to the broad street pump than any other pump. And what you can see is that it matches really well, Particularly if you expand the map out a little bit further. Like, once you get right outside this weird erratic line, the deaths die off dramatically. And little strange little notches where it goes out, the deaths continue off there. And so that's the argument against the straight kind of diffusion theory of miasma, that you wouldn't find that pedestrian traffic map so closely mirroring the deaths. So it's a very clever document. And what ended up happening is, over time, the authorities came around. It took much longer than we like to think. There was not that kind of eureka moment where it was like, oh, Snow was right. We've solved the problem. But by the time. And Snow really never didn't actually live to see the waterborne theory fully embraced. But by the time the next big outbreak came to London in the 1860s after snow had died, the. The authorities kind of reacted immediately, treating it as a waterborne problem. They encouraged everybody who was in the east end of London to boil the water. They investigated what was going on with this, the water supply. And the outbreak was basically dealt with much more quickly. Around that point, they had started to build one of the great engineering achievements of the 19th century, the London sewer system, which was completed more or less in the. Around 1870. And that outbreak in 1866 was the last time that cholera came to London. So you had this thing that was just this terrible killer. It was killing hundreds of thousands of people in this city. And it seemed to get worse and worse and worse. And there was a complete lack of understanding about it, Complete misunderstanding where it was coming from, what the threat was. Then you have this episode, you have the map, you have Snow making the case for it, you have Whitehead kind of collaborating. And then, you know, within 15 years, the problem is entirely eliminated from the city of London, arguably forever. Right now, been 140 years since they solved it, 130 years since they solved it, and it has not come back. So it's great testimony to the possibility of progress. Right? You looked at London in 1854 and you said, this is not working out. But the combination of kind of forces that came together at that particular moment in time ended up having a great kind of battle, Winning a great battle against this great threat. And what you see actually over the next 150 years, over that kind of Long span is the triumph of large scale metropolitan living. So living in a city of 2 million, 3 million people was this strange aberration in 1850. In 1800, 2% of the planet lived in cities. And as of, you know, just a few months ago, actually, the planet is now 50% urban. That may be the single most important kind of demographic stat of our time, is that mass migration to the cities that have happened. And it's happened largely because cities are. Have become, particularly in the developing world, sustainable propositions, because, precisely because of the battle over things like cholera. So what are the lessons that we take from this? I mean, what are the kind of key attributes? I think there are a bunch of them. The first is the importance of thinking across scales. Like, Snow was able to make the case because he couldn't find the silver bullet, because he couldn't actually show up with the bacterium and say, here it is. This is what's causing cholera. He had to solve the problem across different scales. So he was looking for the agent in the water, he was looking on the scale of bacteria, but he couldn't get to it. But he was trying to solve the problem that way. On the other hand, he was looking at individual bodies. One of the reasons why he was able to come up with a theory is that he was trained as a physician, and he realized that the pattern of the disease through the human body suggested something that had been swallowed rather than something that had been inhaled. So his knowledge of kind of the organ system of the human body was crucial to his original insight. But he was also looking at the patterns of consumption and the existing kind of drinking water technologies inside a neighborhood. So he was moving up one level from the body to look around to see what people were doing in the neighborhood. And then, in fact, he did a number of different studies that were citywide, looking at the overall drinking patterns of the entire city. And so he was moving from the scale of microbes all the way up to the scale of the city. And it was only in being able to move across those different scales that he was able to fully make that case. And that kind of perspective is what I call the long zoom from the very small to the very large. And built into that is the idea of thinking across disciplines. Right. As you move from each of those levels, you move across different disciplines. So the fact that he was trained as a physician, but was able to kind of dabble in cartography and able to move back and forth between these different disciplines was crucial to the breakthrough. Then you have Whitehead, and then you have this idea that the amateur. I mean, Snow himself was a kind of amateur in that he had no official professional training as a cholera detective or as a cartographer. But Whitehead was just a classic amateur. I mean, he had no credentials for this at all. But what he had was local knowledge, right? He had that local social intelligence. He knew everybody in the neighborhood. He knew what people were talking about. He knew where they went to get their water. And because of that, he was able to be really ultimately kind of crucial to this, to this case. The other thing that is central to the story that I didn't mention before is that about 15 years before this happened, the kind of master statistician and demographer, Henry Farr of this period had standardized a system for reporting the deaths in London. And basically, London had been kind of cataloging people dying for. For a while. But what Farr said is we should release every two weeks the kind of weekly report of how many people died, how old they were, whether they were a man or a woman, what neighborhood they were in and such as we can tell what they died of. And so they started issuing these weekly kind of mortality tables every two weeks. And what was crucial about it is that they pushed it out to anybody. It was, in a sense, this kind of open source, you know, release of all this information. The idea was, we don't know who's going to find this useful, but somebody is going to be able to kind of look at this data and see interesting patterns and figure out what to do with it. It was a very new idea, and part of it was standardizing around a kind of a platform of what data is important and what data you can reliably get, right? And so Snow and Whitehead both used those weekly reports extensively in building their map of what happened. In some sense, it would have been very hard to do it without those. That kind of open platform. So somebody asked me the other day when I was talking about the book, and they were like, well, you know, it's nice to think about railing against orthodoxies, and the miasma theory was bad, and the rebel comes along and overthrows it. But sometimes it's nice to, you know, work within an orthodoxy, because an orthodoxy lets you do things and standardizes what you're, you know, the language and stuff like that. But I said in response is, you know, well, actually, what you want more than anything else is a platform. Like an orthodoxy is saying, don't think outside of this division. The problem with cholera is that it's in the air, not in the water. Don't bother thinking about the water, you got to think this way. Whereas a platform says, look, these are the tools. Go and build something that you want with it. These are the numbers, this is the data, these are the standards we're going to use to describe what's happening in the world. And you analyze it and we'll give it away. We'll let anybody look at it. And so this kind of statistical platform that far built was crucial to this. And then finally there's this idea of the hunch, right? I mean, Snow had a hunch initially about the waterborne theory. Snow had a hunch at Broad street that this case might be the one that would help him solve the riddle of cholera or convincingly prove the waterborne theory to other people. White had a hunch that was wrong. White had a hunch that he could disprove Snow's theory about the pomp. And all of these things are driven by this sense of like, I've got something, I think there's something there, and if I can chase it down, I'm not sure if I can make the case yet, but I've got a hunch that this is right. And so many great ideas start in that form. They start in that half baked or a quarter baked or an eighth baked kind of form. And they crucially need time. I mean, it took Snow six years to get to a kind of fully convincing version of the waterborne theory. Maybe even took them longer because the authorities took longer to come around to it. And so one of the great problems we have as a society, as an organization, as corporations, as individuals, is how to give hunches the time they need to survive. Right? Because most really good breakthrough ideas start off as kind of bad, wrong headed ideas and then slowly evolve into something much better. So how do you build systems that cultivate hunches rather than try and shut them down? I just want to say a couple things about the present here and a couple examples and mentioned my project and one other thing. So there are a number of different ways in which all these themes connect with what's going on. I mean, you can see that map as like, you know, the original mash up, right? On some level, like there's all this data out there and they're just kind of plotting it differently on the map. So it's obviously related to a lot of things that are going on at Google. I want to talk about kind of two examples. The first is New York City's 311 program. How many people have followed at all? What's going on with 311, and it's showing up in some other places, too, But New York has the most extensive one. So 311 is an extraordinary service, and I feel like it's a direct descendant of what was going on at Broad street in the 1850s. What? 311 is kind of a threefold service, right? It does three things. It's kind of a soft 911. So it's a number you can call if there's, like, a homeless guy kind of sleeping near the playground. Not an immediate threat, but probably somebody should talk to him. You can call 311 so you don't choke up the 911 line if somebody's breaking into your house, which doesn't happen very much in New York anymore, But it used to. You still call 911, but 311, you can call if it's kind of a softer emergency like that. And it's actually since they introduced it, it's the first time in the city's history where the 911 call went down, because 311 took some of the pressure off it. It's also a kind of information concierge for the city. So anybody can call at any point and say, is there alternate side parking today? Are the public schools closed? I need a battered women's shelter nearby. I'm standing in Prospect Park. I'm wondering if there are any events for kids today in the park. And they have these trained operators who speak 180 different languages, which is pretty great. They have the, you know, the initial operators who can figure out what language you're speaking and then route you to the one who actually speaks it. So you can call in, and they will get you that information instantly, talking to a real live human. So all this stuff is, of course, available on some website somewhere online. But, you know, it's hard to find that information a lot of times, and people don't always have access to the web. So anybody who can dial three numbers on a phone can get that information. So that's nice. But here's what makes it really cool, in a sense. Here's what makes it a kind of pagerank kind of like solution. It's also a way for all those people who are on the streets, all those Henry Whiteheads, all those low local amateurs on the ground, to report back information about what's happening in the city to the kind of command central of the city itself, right? So every time somebody calls in with a complaint, with a question, with an observation, that piece of information gets tagged and geotagged in the kind of city's kind of dashboard of what's going on. So if there's a homeless request at 100, a homeless person complained at 116th and Broadway, there's a noise problem with a bar in parks of Brooklyn tagged with that coordinate there. And so the city has all this information that's being basically reported on by all these people who are not on the payroll of the city. The people who actually live in the streets are based on their own personal needs, helping the city organize all the things that are happening and get a view of what's really happening in the city. So just the way Google said, listen, if we're going to organize the Web, left, deputize everybody who's ever linked from one page to another and help have them help us organize the web. What 311 does is like, let's get anybody who has a cell phone or a phone and can dial three numbers who's calling in to report something they've noticed or ask a question. Let's learn from those patterns and get a much more kind of responsive city. So let's enlist the amateurs. Let's look at kind of broad patterns in the city. Let's use the density. Think about how crucial density was in the case of Broad street, of all these people crowded together to get smarter about what's going on. And a couple things have happened. The first is the first year they did it, they ran the numbers after a year and they realized by far away, the number one complaint that people had was noise. Now, maybe that shouldn't have surprised people. New York City is a noisy city, right? If you live there, it's noisy. But they hadn't realized that that was the thing that was bothering people more than anything else. And so Bloomberg, this whole project, by the way, is a complete Bloomberg creation. It's. It's modeled after the stuff that he built at Bloomberg, his company. And so in the second year, post 311 noise abatement became a big initiative of the administration. They decided that this is something we're really going to, we're really going to focus on because we've got this data from 311. And the other story that I love is the blackout from whenever it was about four years ago. This is Midtown. During the blackout, the city had a whole kind of emergency plan for what to do in a blackout. And they had a whole system set up because they knew it was a possibility. And one of the things was they would give these hourly radio broadcasts because people either had battery powered radios or they could go sit in their cars as one kind of communications platform that was working. And so Bloomberg would give these radio announcements every hour or so. And the 311 line stayed open because people had cell phones and, and sometimes they had phones that were working. And they very quickly started to get these calls from across the city from diabetics who were saying, I've never been, you know, I've never not had power, and I don't know how long my insulin will last unrefrigerated. So I'm trying to figure out if I should go to a hospital right now or in an hour if this thing lasts for more than a few minutes, or do I have a few days. I just don't know the answer to this question. And so this was not something the city had planned on at all. It was not something that they'd ever thought about in this kind of situation. But here it was. You know, there were hundreds, if not thousands of New Yorkers out there who were facing this big life or death question like, am I in peril right now? And because of 311, the city realized that this was a problem in the midst of this crazy chaos. And within three hours of the blackout, Bloomberg was on the air reporting, based on the medical advice he'd been given, that in fact it was fine. You had at least three or four days, your insulin would be fine. There was no panic, no reason to panic, and you'd be fine. So there you have this system where you're able to get in this huge, massive city of 8,9 million people, incredibly distributed. You're able to get a very local, immediate need up to the very highest point in the hierarchy and then have it broadcast back out to everyone. With a system like that, that's an amazing combination of both kind of bottom up intelligence and kind of top down distribution. I think in a way it's one of the great modern information age breakthroughs in the way that cities kind of control themselves and shape themselves. The other thing I just wanted to briefly talk about, and then I'm happy to answer questions about anything at all, or the other books or anything you want to talk about, is a project that I was developing as I was writing Ghost Maps. So one of the weird things that I've done over my career is that I write books and then I kind of develop web things. So my first book interface culture I was doing when I was launching Feed, which was kind of the first general interest online magazine in 95, and then I wrote my second book Emergence, which was really about all these bottom up systems. I was developing plastic.com, which was kind of one of the early kind of community web 2.0 kind of community news sites. And as I was developing, as I was writing Ghost Map, I found myself doing this thing over, you know, kind of coffee before I would sit down to write the book, which is that I would go and kind of compulsively read the local bloggers writing about what was going on in my neighborhoods in Brooklyn, where I live in Park Slope and the kind of brownstone neighborhoods in Brooklyn. There's this whole kind of new wave of these place bloggers writing about the real estate market or the big Atlantic yards, controversial development, or what was happening here, or some mugging that had happened. And they, they were kind of what I was turning to first, right? And I was like, whenever you find yourself kind of gravitating towards a new thing that you weren't able to do before, and that's what you want to do over that first cup of coffee, that's when you kind of want to pay attention, I think, right? And I was realizing that I was getting something from these local bloggers that I was unable to get before. Because the paradox, in a way of our kind of media experiences, the zone of experience of our lives that we care the most about beyond our kind of immediate family in most cases is the zone of like that kind of knowable community around us. The neighborhood, if you live in a city or kind of a broader town, if you live outside of a city, and yet neighborhoods have historically been the most ignored by traditional forms of media, right? You know, your big city paper is great at covering, you know, what's happening citywide and what's happening nationally in terms of politics or sports, or internationally in terms of Iraq or whatever. But the news about the deli that opened around the corner from you, which is truly news in your world, is never going to make it into the paper. And so historically we've only, you know, we've had occasionally neighborhood little newsletters and newspapers and things like that. But normally it's just word of mouth, right? It's just word of mouth of like, hey, I heard there's actually a nice restaurant coming in there, or did you hear that person was mugged? Or what's the deal with the high school principal that they just hired at that local school? And what the local blogger started to do is to take that word of mouth and just make it a little louder. Just kind of amplify, simplify it a Little bit. Right. So I was watching that, and I was writing about amateurs and neighborhoods and how neighborhoods solve problems and cities and all this kind of stuff. And I've always been interested in the overlay between the kind of the web world and the geographic real world. Right. Which we're now, I guess, calling the Geoweb. And so I started to think, you know, maybe there's a way to take to start with all these local bloggers around the country and start organizing them geographically and create a way where you can look at all that information by geography first and see kind of aggregations of what's happening in your community or in other communities you're visiting in a kind of useful way. And so last year, I got together with a couple of programmers. You know, this is exactly the kind of project that would have been impossible to do. It would have cost us $40 million six years ago. But because Google Maps API, because the local bloggers were there, we were able to put it together for $60,000. And we created this little company that is now growing, and it's much bigger now, and I'm glad to give up my lovely writer lifestyle to run it, but it's fun. And this is basically what it looked. How many has anybody seen outside In. Yeah, okay, so. So basically what you can do is you can go in and see we're tracking neighborhoods in 54 cities around the country. We've got a kind of database of 2500. I mean, yeah, 2500 local bloggers. And we're also tracking media sources and things like that. And every little piece of data we have, every URL we have that we found either from media or from somebody's blog or something else on the web, has a physical location established with it, associated with it. Right. Sometimes that location is a fuzzy location, like a neighborhood. Sometimes it's a broad location, like a city. And sometimes it's a very specific street address. And because we've built a publishing platform that's entirely based on geography from the ground up. Right. You're able to do all these things with content and conversation that you can do now with, say, kind of Google Maps, if you're looking for a Starbucks or a dentist or something like that. So you can go in and you can say, all right, I want to see all the things that have been said about crime within one mile of my zip code, but I want to see everything that's been said about poetry readings citywide or within three miles of my zip code. And you can just drag that map around and the screen will instantly redraw and you can see all the kind of conversation that's happening in that area. We've also aggregated all the conversation about individual places. So you can see everything that's been said about the Atlantic Yards development or everything that's been said about BAM or the McCarran park pool. You have one consolidated page that shows you all these different conversations. And there are a bunch of cool things that happen when you have geography at the beginning. It reminds me a little bit of what was so crucial about the URL in the beginning of the web. And one of the things that made the web possible, that made Google possible, is that you had a universal locating device for a virtual document on a server somewhere. Because you'd standardize that location, you could reliably point to it and know that it would be there. What we're doing is the equivalent with actual real world location. Right? And so once you have that, you can do all these kinds of cool things. So I'll just show you one example. So this is a page for a local blogger in Brooklyn called Iguanas Lounge. And these are the places that Iguanas Lounge has blogged about recently, right? So this is the Prospect park ymca, Prospect park itself, the Domino Sugar Refinery, which are trying to figure out whether to landmark and various things. And then these are these places kind of mapped onto, you know, a Google map here. And these pies correspond to the overall chatter about this particular place. So this one, this is for Prospect Park. And so there's a lot of discussion about Prospect park here. So it's a big, it's a big circle there. This is for Prospect park ymca. You can see there have been four total stories about it. And the ratio of kind of orange to black is the ratio of this particular blogger to everybody else. So you can see in a glance, wow, there's a lot of conversation about this place right around the corner, corner. And boy, that conversation has been dominated by the Gowanus Lounge, or actually everybody's talking about it. And you can see right here, right now, we've selected Prospect park ymca. So this is the excerpt from Gowanus Lounge. And then these are the other conversations about it as well. So you can see both how kind of, in a sense, how crowded the conversation is about a given place and who's participating in that conversation. And then quickly go off and see those posts in one thing. And it's entirely because all these URLs are associated with physical points in space. So think about this as both as A way of reading news about what's going on you, about seeing buzz about what's going on around you and also about meeting people who are around you, right. Who are the other people who are attached to these places that are important in my life. This is the way that we think about the world we live in, really. Right. You've got this kind of mental landmark of all these places that are important to you. It's like your house, your kid's school, school, the park, you go the playground, you go the place where your job is. But it's very, very hard to see actually everything that's happening around those kind of core places. Because basically the web isn't organized around real world geography. It's organized around kind of virtual geography in a sense. So this is a way. And you can just, you know, you can just obviously as you imagine, you can just roll over these and see all the different conversations and all the different people that are happening. And then the other thing we did, I'll show you just very quickly and then I'll open it up. The questions. We did this as a one off, but it's kind of cool. This is a time based map of buzz in a neighborhood in Brooklyn, right? So this is the Atlantic Yards development that I mentioned a couple times. Very controversial. And the ratio here is blogs to mainstream media. And this is the kind of buzz in this neighborhood and places that are being talked about. And so this is starting in December and this is basically the conversations that are happening in the blogosphere and you know, in some media sources. So you see Atlantic Yards get bigger and bigger and gets dominated by the blogosphere here over time. And then you see these other things start to pop up and flare out. The building collapsed here and the media covered it a bit. The bloggers weren't as dominant on that. But then you also start to see lots of these small places that are all orange and that's the kind of long tail of geography. Basically those are, that's the local deli that opens that the New York Times is never going to cover, but that a local blogger will cover. And that'll be relevant to you if you are zoomed in on that level, if you live around the corner of it. And so we're finding, and we've actually seen this more and more that the map is like this is the kind of big important stuff, but it's also filled with these small little blogger only locations that are. That actually is the kind of the fabric of people's communities that it's made Up. So what if you go back to London now? The. Streets are still basically the same. The grid never really changes. It's now, you know, incredibly dynamic, fancy, lots of little web startups and boutiques and hipster record stores and sushi places and so on. But a couple of. A couple of. There was kind of a big workhouse where all the poor were kind of crammed together, where they had a lot of issues, and it's still there. It's now a parking garage, but basically almost all the buildings have changed. And the only one that's retained its same function over that period in this entire neighborhood is, tellingly, a pub that it's still right in front of where the pump was at 40 Broad Street. It was a pub then. It was a pub 100 years before, and it's still a pub. So that's one thing that doesn't change in London is the pubs are anchored there on the corners like that. And the only thing that's changed about it, you'll see if you go back and visit it, is that it's now called the John Snow. So go check it out. We get a chance. Thank you very much. So, by the way, also, I'm happy to sign books, too, after. After this, but we have mics if anybody has any questions. And I'm Again, we can talk about Ghost Map. We can talk about the other books or outside in. Or anything. Oh, yeah, yeah. Okay. All right, we'll go quick. Sorry, I went on. I just kept babbling. Hi. Thanks. This is. This is great. I think the miasma theory goes way back, like to Roman times, right? Yeah, yeah. Because malaria. Yeah. Was there actual scientific research done to kind of prove that or was it just, you know, the argument from antiquity? You know, it's funny, one of my favorite parts of the book that I'm most proud of is the. There's a kind of analysis of why miasma stayed around as long as it did. You know, important part in the history of ideas is why do bad ideas survive sometimes longer than they should? And the answer is you have to think about it in a kind of a long zoom kind of way as well, that the answer works across lots of different levels. Part of it is an evolutionary reason that our brains evolved to deal with disgusting smells with a kind of an alarm system that goes off, whereas we don't deal with, like, bacteria that we can't see in the same way. We're able to smell very small molecules in a way that our eyes are not able to see. But there was a lot of research into it and there were a lot of just kind of false positives, you know, where basically they did a lot of analyses of elevation and they were kind of like, okay, it's smellier. If you go out to Hampstead where it's higher up, the air is cleaner and there's no cholera up there. So it must be that the air, because the air is kind of denser and smellier down here by the banks of the river. And the problem of course was it was by the banks of the river. And so, and there was a lot of stuff on, you know, I mean the reports that the officials generated were obsessed with temperature. I mean it was just like endless weather charts for what had happened that month and what, you know, the humidity levels and the temperature levels and stuff like that. And it's just a complete attempt to scientifically explain why the smells had gotten worse. And if you looked at it, it was hot, it was smelly. And so, you know, there was on some level reason to think that, that, you know, that correlation was in fact a kind of a causal link. So it wasn't just people, you know, there were people who were trying to apply the scientific method of the problem. It just wasn't, it wasn't quite working. One or two more questions, anybody? Yeah, I just want to ask you about the 311 thing. So is there a platform though? Yeah, it's a good question. I was just. It's really expensive and I don't know, other cities have started using, have brought out. Baltimore has one, but I mean, can you get the data? Oh yes. Can you get. Yes, you can. Not as much as one would like. So there are pages where you can see kind of number of noise complaints, number of things. So you can kind of research your neighborhood. But it would be great if there was an API. I mean it would be so cool if they could figure out a way to say like these are all the data points we have. Query it any way you want, represent it any way you want, make your own mashups of it. That would be fantastic. What they have is like very pre rendered kind of charts of 10 or 20, it looks like, you know, crime statistics by precinct, kind of things that they release. So it's a little stale, but. And one of the other issues as a platform is can you bring it to smaller cities? Because it really, it works to have all those resources on a scale of New York because there's so many people who can participate and you get so much information. But I've been talking to some folks who are trying to figure out how you do it for, you know, Burlington, Vermont, where you don't have that kind of density and you don't have the sheer number of people. So it's going to be really interesting to see how it kind of spreads as a city technology. All right. Thanks again. Thank you very much for coming out.