Prepare All You Want, Only the Network Will Save You

It's a pretty well-known essay, for folks of an older generation at least, the one about The Pencil, and how not a single person on Earth knows how to make a pencil. It takes all of us. 

Jules Verne showed us this as well, when the hermetic Captain Nemo, who created a nuclear powered submarine in 1871 (when it absolutely did not exist yet) to exile himself from humanity on the bottom of the ocean, still needed to coordinate with people who clandestinely supplied him with certain necessities every so often. 

Walden too; he travels to town several times a week, not only for the social necessities that keep us from detaching from consensual reality, but for certain supplies that he can't get for himself.

I think about this when he see the survivalist movement hunkering down for the end of times. None of us will survive on our own.

Image credit: Marcin Bieleck, Fallout Shelter at the Museum of the Cold War, Podborska, Poland, 2017 [link]

He's talking about a Mongol 482, by Eberhard Faber Pencil Company in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. I was a Dixon Ticonderoga No. 2 myself:

Pick me up and look me over. What do you see? Not much meets the eye — there's some wood, lacquer, the printed labeling, graphite lead, a bit of metal, and an eraser.

-I, Pencil, from an essay by Leonard Reed titled "Only God Can Make a Tree - Or a Pencil, in From Anything That's Peaceful: The Case for the Free Market (1964) The Foundation for Economic Education, NY. [run a search for the pdf and it should be easy to find, or try this link and scroll to page 140ish]

The making of a pencil starts out simple enough. Cedar tree logs are shipped around California, from the forests to the mills, and that's where it gets complicated. The millions of dollars of milling machines, the lead of the pencil, which is graphite, is mined in Ceylon, and mixed with clay, from Mississippi, and finished with wax, from Mexico. Then the lacquer, the label, the ferrule, and the eraser. 

The pencil itself isn't even the hardest part. It's "the configuration of creative human energies - millions of tiny know-hows configurating naturally and spontaneously in response to human necessity and desire and and in the absence of any human master-minding."

Configuration is a code word for the network. And we're not focusing here on how the network functions, just that it's made of lots and lots of parts, and the outcome - the production capacity of this network - falls apart without all the parts.