Back in March (2020 if you are living in the future) the New York Times ran an op-ed by a “professor of information science who specializes in the social effects of technology” on why the CDC was wrong about who needs to wear face masks. Zeynep Tufekci’s article may have been the tipping point in bringing health professionals out of the woodwork to say what they’d been thinking all along: masks, any mask, reduces the chance of viral transmission.

Today, August 24 (still 2020) the Times doubled down with an article about Tufekci and how she “keeps getting things right.” And why. The why is that she’s a Nexialist, but we’ll get back to that in a minute.

The Times cited a number of issues she’s spoken out on since 2011, about Twitter as a driver of social movements, the causative effect of media coverage of school shootings, Facebook’s potential to fuel ethnic cleansing, and YouTube’s potential as a tool of radicalization. With 2020 hindsight, none of these seem all that radical, but she’s been consistently ahead of the curve.

How? She’s (data) sciences the hell out of it.

Tufekci grew up in Turkey with a pretty dysfunctional family, then bounced between Belgium and Turkey and ended up working for IBM in the US as a programmer in the mid 90s. She didn’t fit in, but she discovered early digital communities and saw how they were shaping new ways of social movements. She moved on to get “a PhD. from the University of Texas at Austin studying what she calls “techno-sociology” and became obsessed with how digital media could change society.” Then she started speaking out, with articles in The Atlantic and The New York Times, She’s published two books about social media and its impact; Rebel Repress (2014) and Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest (2017).

So, she had early exposure to digital communities and social activism, a background in data science, an international perspective, and a belief in “complex, systems-based thinking”.

One more important thing. She read science fiction as a teen in Turkey. The piece says Le Guin was a favorite and it’s easy to see how her stories provide the groundwork for looking at society, technology, and social issues. What Le Guin doesn’t offer is the power of collective action. Her characters are generally loners, like the wizard Ged in the Wizard of Earthsea, George Orr in The Lathe of Heaven, or the physicist Shevek in The Dispossessed. Le Guin’s early protagonists tended to be male, but they were able to step outside the boundaries of white male culture to provide a counterpoint, and I expect the young Tufekci looked beyond gender to see herself in those stories.

Nexialism is the science of joining in an orderly fashion the knowledge of one field of learning with that of other fields.’ In other words, one that integrates the findings of more specialized disciplines into an effective problem-solving methodology, whose specialisation was to connect specialists from widely divergent fields.” (Voyage of the Space Beagle)

But much as I love Le Guin, and I do, the author that Dr. Tufekci makes me think of is A.E. van Vogt. Outside the science fiction community, van Vogt is best known for his 1950 novel, Voyage of the Space Beagle, which featured an alien much like the one in Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979). The novel is actually a series of short stories about a research ship touring the galaxy and filled with specialists for every possible field of scientific study, but the unifying conflict comes from the main character’s different from all the other scientists.  Elliot Grosvenor is a Nexalist.

“Nexialism? What’s that?” asks one of the crew members to the Nexialist (the term for one who practices Nexialism). “Applied whole-ism”, replies Grosvenor. (Voyage of the Space Beagle)‘

van Vogt coine the word to describe an approach to science and knowledge that crossed the boundaries of individual disciplines.  Nexialism considers all of knowledge as a complex and interrelated system and believes that focusing on any one alone is bound to miss important connections.  It’s likely that Dr. Tufekci is aware of van Vogt’s contribution to relational science, as she’s a champion of “systemic thinking”

As she says in her Atlantic article about the causes for decision failures during the pandemic, “As it turns out, the reality-based, science-friendly communities and information sources many of us depend on also largely failed…because of widespread asystemic thinking: the inability to think about complex systems and their dynamics.” (The Atlantic, It Wasn’t Just Trump Who Got It Wrong)

That reads just like something van Vogt would have said.

Nexialism never seems to have caught on, though its tenets spring up elsewhere, and I don’t know if Dr. Tufekci read van Vogt growing up, but it clear that she’s come to the same conclusions about what it will take to solve complex problems, and when it comes to humans, its safe to say that all problems are complex.

You can follow Zeynep Tufekci’s Twitter Feed here: zeynep tufekci (@zeynep) · Twitter