-Patterns, Populations, Products

Monoculture describes systems that have very low diversity. The term is applied in several fields.In agriculture, "monoculture" describes the practice of relying on a very small number of genetic variants, or cultivars of a food crop for commercial agriculture. Modern agriculture relies on standardization on a single cultivar so that the technology for tilling, planting, pest control, and harvesting, can be used over large geographical areas to obtain an economy of scale.Monoculture can lead to large scale crop failure as this single genetic variant or cultivar becomes susceptable to a disease. The Irish potato famine was caused by susceptability to Phytophthora infestans. The wine industry in Europe was devastated by susceptability to Phylloxera. Each crop then had to be replaced by a new cultivar imported from another country that had used a different genetic variant that was not susceptible to the pathogen.In sociology, a monoculture is any sort of system wherein everyone is wearing, doing, seeing, reading, watching, and thinking the same thing. Some argue that the modern ideas of political correctness and enforced multiculturalism will inevitably spawn a global monoculture, pointing as evidence to the fact that in every historical society where two or more cultures have been put together and made to integrate, they invariably form a monoculture.In computer science, a monoculture is any computer system which is nearly universally used. This concept is significant when discussing computer security and viruses. In particular, Dan Geer has argued that Microsoft is a monoculture, since a striking majority of the overall number of computers connected to the Internet are workstations and servers running versions of the Microsoft Windows operating system, many of which are vulnerable to the same attacks. This is in contrast to the early days of the net, when there was a much more even distribution of operating systems and hardware/processor types, and it was concomitantly much more difficult to create a broadly applicable attack.

If you wish to seek out for yourself the descriptions offered above, you can visit wikipedia for the reference. You and I have that in common--we share many, many things, actually. The most obvious of the points to consider are the keyboards, pointing devices and screens before each of us. We have this network, these pipes and streams, and our nodes. I could throw literally hundreds of other televisual, musical (commercial and artistic), textual (literally (double-entendre within a double parentheses) and post-modern) historical, etc, etc references at you, and you'd know just what I mean--or look it up.

I see conservative critics bemoan the potential loss of our shared American culture in the face of illegal immigration. The perceived threat is less important to me than the perceived threatened. The idea seems to be that those things which we share are of some great value, and deserve, demand, our protection.

I won't be so cynical as to say that there is no value here, that there is nothing to protect. "Culture", however, means about as much as you or I say it does. If you are looking for a similarly nebulous term, try "cool". From Grandma on down through two generations, folks will use the term seriously, with and without irony, to mean nouns and adjectives in radical oppostion, depending on the tongue.

The Florida Film Festival is in town now. I have seen a few of the movies, and tomorrow, maybe a couple more. Two that I would have you consider in the context of this dialogue (?) are City of Mermaids and Muskrat Lovely. I saw them both today--one is a short, the other a feature, respectively--and finally found some focus for my rambling internal monologue on monoculture. (This has been in draft form for about a week--no end in sight.)

I won't rehash them for you, but let me summarize: both films take on regional, endangered parts of our American life that are going, going, not-really-available-to-us-anywhere-but-at-a-multiplex but not quite gone. For our mermaids, the threat has already come and gone, and established itself decisively. In a now almost cliched 20th c. story, this little (completely irreproducible) haven of middle American culture (?) called Weeki Wachee saw itself bypassed in the construction of an insterstate. Without an offramp or connector, the crowds dwindled and the dollars flowed elsewhere. See the movie--they'll tell you. I'd like to swim with them, next to moss-backed manatee.

Right down the highway (with an off-ramp and many connectors) is a World that one of the mermaids described as made of paint, plastic and concrete--Disney. Sterilized, contained, homogenized, commercialized, but I won't demonize the mouse. That's neither my job nor my inclination. I understand that it brings joy--that's enough for me, even if I do not always share or understand it.

Muskrat Lovely, the feature, documents a world with, perhaps, a slightly better chance of survival than Weeki Wachee. The county where the film is set borders a wildlife refuge in eastern Maryland, and is a world that makes me miss a place I never have and never will be. With the build-up to and completion of two contests relating to the title in ways you might not suspect, the movie, at its core, is the story of a community, and I use that amorphous term with all the richness and depth I hope it can convey.

There are places which the camera chooses not to linger or explore--as it pulls away from the outline of a buxom cartoon woman colored in with the confederate stars and bars in the t-shirt of a contestant--even so, the film-maker's even-handedness is echoed by the fairness espoused by the contests' administrators. The director clearly liked her subjects, and the openness with which her camera was received assures us that they too liked her, and each other. In the hands of many others, such sympathy could easily have turned to ridicule.

I miss those places and their people, without even one meeting or visit. The degree to which they seem quaint, unreal, endangered, forgotten is, perhaps more than anything, a measure of my waning groundedness in the real. I want to think that my discouragement in the sameness of those around me, in the bombardment of advertising and its steamroller effect on individuality may be nothing more than over-senstivity. Beyond those little pockets of little America, can you see meaningful differences beyond our overwhelming similarities?

Look to the sociological definition of monoculture listed above: everyone is wearing, doing, seeing, reading, watching, and thinking the same thing I could give you lots of examples that might make me seem at times cynical, discouraged, jealous, insightful--I'll refrain in favor of asking you to look around your day. Then look to the other defnitions for computer and agricultural monocultures listed above. To what evil, or disease, does our growing sameness expose us? Think mad cow, oil dependence, plumbing, grain production--the big things we share. Send me ideas because I would like to make a list.

As Weeki Wachee's crowds dwindle, and Outdoor festivals in eastern Maryland look increasingly backwater, lots of wonderful things will happen, with economy of scale triumphant, and our increasingly standard sense of normalcy intact.

Homogenized is good for milk, I guess, but maybe not so good for people. Illegal immigrants don't frighten me as much as hundreds of television channels. One we welcome, even pay for. The other we fear and erect fences to prevent. We may have things backwards.

PS--I saw two other movies after having written most of this. One was The Giant Buddhas, and the other was the orignal Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Perhaps my choice of movies, and the way I interpreted them, was nothing more than confirmation bias, but each seems to me to be cautionary about the rolling blackout of sameness.

With the first two films, market forces more than anything shape the world, flattening it in a way not applauded or even recognized by the prophets of globalization. In the latter films, it is repression and violent dominance behavior that threaten uniqueness and difference. In different ways and places, the effect is the same: monoculture--ugly, predictable and of questionable sustainability.