An Example of Fractal Pluralism
For example, I interviewed Mitch, who works at Zipcar, in Portland, Oregon. Mitch has his socio-economic/ geographic-historical specificity, his nature, his nurture, his history of encounters with information. Throughout his life he has limited his focus and developed interests. When asked what they were, he answered, ”Environmentalism, sports, and electoral politics.” He expresses these in terms of action. He goes camping with his girlfriend, volunteer coaches basketball, watches a lot of CNN and works at Zipcar. If we look at Zipcar, there are all the people and organizations they work with - the Springwater Trust, the stores that give them priority parking, their customes. To Mitch, this is his network. If we take it further, we can understand the building they pay rent to, their I-phone app. And not only their customers, but all of the reasons why Zipcar is a viable option leading their customers to choose to be a part of Zipcar, and all the other human and non-human actors that support, enable and influence the existence of this one branch of Zipcar as their Actor Network.
Clearly, Mitch and everyone involved in Zipcar are working to bring about transformations in transportation, creating options and alternatives for how we get from point A to point B. So transportation is the interest plateau that Zipcar inhabits. There they are right along with people all over the world addressing the issue of transportation, most of whom have a different idea of what alternatives are best and what the overall system should look like.
It is the groups that are attempting to bring about change in the same area that are most likely the ones in vicious disagreement with each other. Mario, an inventor I interviewed who works with electric cars, thinks that Zipcar is insufficient to bring about the immense changes necessary to address climate change. Mitch thinks Mario’s project and electric cars are overall unrealistic. However, Fractal Pluralism sees their efforts are in concert with each other, co-existing almost like different kinds of medicinal plants in an eco-system, which simultaneously create options that make sense and are viable for differently situated subjects, who come from different natures, nurtures and with distinct encounters with information who will gravitate towards the options that best fulfill their emotional and pragmatic needs. Seeing Pluralistically does not mean ignoring these differences or undermining points of view. Instead it encourages us to look for the ways in which what could be perceived as a tension or a disagreement on one scale is in fact working in cooperation on another. In this case, both Mario’s project with electric cars and Zipcar are organically involved in the incremental process to transform what is and what we believe to be possible regarding transportation.
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