Chaos As Social Order

and diverge into multiple orders or basins which, in a city such as Taiwan, can include new millionaires, depression and suicide, new environmental activism, unprecedented street crime, a clean, quiet electrorail system, and some of the worst air pollution in the world.  As the unprecedented, the novel, the new, and the unheard of increase in extent and frequency, complexity becomes chaos.

3.  Assassination.  A brief example from another country comes from Mexico, shortly after the assassination of PRI Presidential Candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio, in Tijuana.  Interviewed for the New York Times, March 27th issue, by Tim Golden, Jesús Cantú, “an editor whose independent newspaper” had been “firebombed two weeks” previously, shared a widespread feeling that the assassination had shown weakness in Mexico’s political system “that once seemed indestructible.”  In terms of chaos, such a change is emergent porosity.  The laminar state space of Mexico has articulated into turbulence with a dramatic increase in possible trajectories of social and political practice.  It is no accident or surprise, from the standpoint of chaos theory, that the Mayan uprising in the south happened shortly before the assassination.  As Cantú remarked, “You feel now like anything could happen” (Golden 3).

4.  Cyberspace.  The electronic trip is a dependent phenomenon–when the power goes out the trip stops.  As a dependent phenomenon it must constantly be recreated.  The qualities it has are the qualities given it by those who take, make, and use it–Aryans make it Aryan, environmentalists make it environmental, investors make it investing.  It does not have the independent existence of the natural, hardwired software known as imagination.  Why

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