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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