In praise of digital disorder.

• Author: Mangu-Ward, Katherine
• Position: Soundbite - Interview

David Weinberger has been a philosophy professor, an entrepreneur, a jokewriter for Woody Allen, and a campaign adviser to Howard Dean. Currently he's a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. His first book-The Cluetrain Manifesto, written with his fellow Internet gurus Christopher Locke, Rick Levine, and Doc Searls--reshaped how companies look at marketing in the digital age. His second book, Small Pieces Loosely Joined, explored and celebrated the open structure of the Web. His newest effort, Everything is Miscellaneous (Times Books), is a defense of digital disorder with a pleasingly anti-authoritarian bent.

Associate Editor Katherine Mangu-Ward spoke with Weinberger in May.

Q: You are a strong advocate for messiness. Why?

A: In the physical world, messiness is a jumble of things that you can't see the order in or where you can't find what you want. It's very inefficient. In the online world, messiness works because we can order things in any way that makes sense to us without having to actually move the things themselves. If you want to rearrange your physical CDS, you have to move the objects themselves. If you want to rearrange your digital tracks, you create play lists. You can create as many as you want, and they don't detract from one another.

Q: Many people fear that replacing Encyclopedia Britannica with Wikipedia, newspapers with blogs, albums with play lists, and the Dewey decimal system with Amazon.com will lead to chaos. Should we be worried that the old ways of ordering things are falling apart?

A: There's an indefinite number of ways that we can slice, dice, and cluster the things in the universe. Saying that there is a single "real" order just isn't coherent. That's an order that nobody cares about, by definition. The rest of the orders are the ones that emerge because we have a project, because we care about something.

If you're trying to find spices to put in your curry, then you're going to cluster stuff in the kitchen--at least mentally--by "Is it a spice or not?" If you're looking for something to...