Lately, my boss has taken to quoting the famous philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, as in a recent whitepaper: “Civilization advances by extending the number of operations we can perform without thinking about them.” So now, our marketing is claiming that Vivísimo “advances civilization.” By Whitehead’s criterion, of course, that’s absolutely true. If I agreed with Whitehead, I’d be morally obliged to hand in my resignation. But an education in anthropology has given me the perspective to see a common but fundamental error in his unspoken assumptions. I think the kind of clustering Vivísimo does actually undermines civilization–and gives me the happy obligation to keep a very good job.

The problem lies in the word “civilization” itself. What do we mean by it? The dictionary definition talks about an “advanced” society, harking back to the bad old days of lineal societal progression. This is certainly the meaning Whitehead–and Vivísimo–intend. But, this sense is also meaningless. What society is more “advanced” than another? We pride ourselves as a civilization, based primarily on our technological achievement. In that, we are certainly unparalleled. But in terms of personal fulfillment or ecological viability, we are positively backwards. Our society is full of enraged, broken, unfulfilled, even suicidal people, and our way of life is so unsustainable it will be a major miracle if it manages to survive another century. In those respects, if not in technology, we are positively “primitive,” and the only “civilizations” would be various tribal peoples around the world.

This was the realization that led anthropologists to reject such notions of lineal progression among societies–and made that sense of the term “civilization” obsolete. Rather, they turned civilization from a mark of “advancement” to a mark of “complexity,” where “complexity” means “hierarchy.” After all, many tribal cultures are incredibly complex and remarkably elegant. By the anthropological definition–and if we let biologists define “life,” shouldn’t anthropologists define “civilization”?–civilization advances when wealth and/or power are concentrated in the hands of fewer people.

In this much more realistic sense of the word, Vivísimo–and all clustering–undermines civilization in a very significant way.

Consider the long, unordered list of results spewed out of a ranking engine like Google. The underlying concept of this approach–an underlying assumption that is subtly reinforced with every single query you perform–is that no matter the topic, no matter the question, there is always a best result, a second best, a third, and so on. Every time you search Google, you are subconsciously reminded that for everything, there is a ranking, and order from best to worst. Why should people be exempt from this? Google denotes a worldview–a worldview that “advances civilization” by reminding us that our superiors are better than us in every way, and that it is right and natural to obey those above us, and abuse those below us.

Taxonomies are little better. Human-edited taxonomies are rigid and take time to construct, edit, and maintain. They always lag behind the times. Moreover, they reflect the bias of their editors. Should the “Physical Anthropology” section include a sub-section for “Evolution” or not? Bias can work both ways in a human-edited taxonomy: either including sub-directories with too few entries, thus inflating their importance, or neglecting a sub-directory that should exist by not creating it, thus deflating the importance of those results. Taxonomies shine only insofar as they approach, and forever lag behind, automated clustering. That brings with it an attitude of human superiority–that we as humans not only know all that exists, but can categorize it and define it. In Genesis, Adam is told to name all the animals–by naming, it implies his dominion over them. Taxonomies bring with their continually outdated rigidity and bias a smug superiority of anthropocentrism and specism.

Clustering like Vivísimo’s has a very different philosophy behind it. By organizing results on the fly, the categories are always timely and relevant. The human bias is eliminated. It does not map the way we think the data should be, but the way the data is. Taxonomies merely organize; Vivísimo can defy expectations, and highlight themes and connections you didn’t realize existed. More importantly, it relegates ranking to a distantly secondary importance. Primacy is given to the clustering–to the relationships between results. Clustering implies that there is no one right answer for any question, but that the best answer lies in the patterns of relationships between them. By the same extension we made for Google, people are not “better” than one another; it is the relationships between them that are most important. Those relationships are not as simple and one-dimensional as a mere list. They are complicated, interconnected, and elegant.

Google “advances civilization” by subtly legitimizing hierarchy, oppression and control. Vivísimo undermines it by implying that no person is “better” than any other–just wildly different. It provides us a model of how so many wildly diverse things can yet be equal in some way. It delegitimizes the most central ideas of civilization, and points towards a much better form of society, where all people can be appreciated–not just the ones at the top of the pile.

Of course, this is all very subtle. No one goes to Google thinking they’re supporting “the Man.” But it is this kind of subtlety that is most pivotal in the formation of a society. Grand, sweeping revolutions do little to change the world; they are big enough and grandiose enough to recognize for what they are, and ignore. It is the subtle, unconscious, unspoken insinuation that is most powerful, because it enters your brain unchallenged. “The most difficult thing to talk a man out of,” Thomas Jefferson said, “is something he was never talked into.” Google and Clusty subtly, quietly, and powerfully insinuate very different views of the world. They slip into your brain unchallenged, reinforce themselves with every iteration, and become entrenched in your mind as unquestionable, unassailable truths, regardless of how much evidence you find to the contrary. Google’s world is one of strict ranking, hierarchy and control. Clusty’s world is one where everyone is valued as a person, and the world arises not from the domination of superior versus inferior, but from a complex web of interweaving relationships.

Vivísimo makes the world a much better place, by undermining the most essential, defining element of civilization: control. That makes me very proud to be a software engineer for them, and very happy to work the hours I do–knowing, at the end of the day, I helped do some good.

Please note, this is strictly my opinion. It has not been approved, endorsed, or even read by anyone from Vivísimo except me. This is my opinion of what my job entails. It is certainly not a philosophical outlook shared by employers, or even my co-workers. This is not Vivísimo’s official position–as I said before, its official position is that it advances civilization, not undermines.