I find more useful models for thinking about the complex flows related to young people in the work of ethno-musicologist Alan O’Connor, hanging out in the dirty punk clubs of Mexico City and observing the punk scenes transnational circuits. Situated within the city’s underground, a Mexican punk habitus provides the social organization funneling new music, ideas, and people into an array of zones and fields of relations across Latin American and into Europe and North America. For O’Connor “[t]he concept of habitus describes a structure of practices based on lived experience (family, neighborhood, school), but because it stresses the unfolding of experience in time it also involves choice and uncertainty (2004, 179). A more unsettled way of viewing local change and global transmission operates such that “a Mexican punk is much more likely to rely on what is available in the weekly El Chopo rock market or to get copies of cassettes from a friend. In the dialectic between individual tastes in music and what is easily available, there is a structuring structure: on the one hand, the social organization of musical tastes; and, on the other, the distribution channels for punk music” (Ibid.). O’Connor pointedly contests Appadurai’s famed conception of flows with its “chaos theory” approach to the pulse and sway of globalization. O’Connor presents a starker model with lines of domination, economic centers and peripheries, and uneven social terrains of class and urban/rural scoring the punk scene’s landscape. With Bourdieu’s concept of habitus—a structuring structure through which group tastes and desires are produced—O’Connor formulates a hermeneutics of globalization with which to track various localized strata of power, affect, and relation. While his arguments regarding the specific trajectories of punk scenes from Mexico City to elseshere, namely Toronto and Barcelona, are not entirely satisfying or nor is the concept of habitus sufficiently animated or complicated through ethnographic research, his work opens a critical space to think about agents of transfer and the embodied nature of globalization while being direct about naming sites of power: people are central to the concept yet are so often written out until they become the signs and victims of hazy forces from elsewhere.

Cautioned by O’Connor’s critique of Appadurai’s notion of flows, but not ready to commit to the binary structure/agency relay activated through habitus, I borrow a less common phrasing to think the idea of a global youth imaginary enacted within local spaces (in the well-defined corridors O’Connor puts in place through his use of habitus) and across broad and divergent geo-cultural spaces pulled together through Appadurai’s “chaos theory” of flows where material linkages of intense communication networks and commodity circulation fail to register the body enmeshed with machines and improvising aesthetic, intellectual, spatial, informational, and media practices. Perhaps a discomfort with “flows” is appropriate. It connotes a smooth, organic movement, typically unidirectional, as in a stream, rather than something like tides (temporally regulated from afar and linked poetically to fates or destined change) or currents (pattern-based and predictable by seasonal temperature changes if nonetheless powerful as a metaphor for shifting popular tastes, techniques, perceptions, and desires). Flows originate from one source and transfer, with force, to another, depositing whatever else has been picked up along the way. But the chaos that O’Connor perceives (and, curiously for someone so focused on punk, dislikes) is not something I want to dispense with. The variables are significant and exciting, rather than interfering noise or an unwelcome interruption in making analysis airtight for policy abstracts and news sound bites. I borrow another term to think with from unlikely and imposing sources: bioinformatics and quantitative social science. I say imposing because these disciplines depend almost entirely on the magic of mathematical modeling to capture unruly human action and hold them in place long enough to develop a coefficient of meaning from their ever-baffling, ever curious choices. In one particularly dense work of mathematical world-building, Konstantin Klemm and his associates use the term “cultural drift” to describe “random changes in individual traits” (Centola et al. 2007). “Drift” is akin to genetic deviations producing glitches in the sequence and inaccuracies in the DNA information syntax. Though rather than producing more difference, as one would expect in the biological context, Klemm finds that culture, using Axelrod’s oft-cited modeling, even when surrounded by diversity, will shift towards a “monoculture” through the process of homophily or the attraction of sameness. Centola et al put forward a complex, algorithmic proposition regarding cultural drift: despite the small changes internal to culture due to error or innovation, “emergent cultural diversity,” while typically an unstable integer in these models, is found to be stable when it co-evolves with “network structure”—a network of social interaction.

The models on display in this field of culture calculus are incredibly reductive in plotting the evolutionary trajectories of two-dimensional cultural actor avatars in “parameter space.” But despite the computer game design terminology, the structuralism is vivid and seductively practical. The limited dimensionality of these flat cultural avatars and their very lack of frustrating “chaos” or noise facilitates mapping quantitative control onto social territories that could care less about how they register as tidy programming scripts in a mathematical hypothesis about contact, influence, breakdown, and change. The language usurps the local into predictable bits of data and inserts these local strata into a uniform, global universe of game method such that no difference or diversion cannot be coded for and provided a smooth face to interact with its adjacent avatars. An entirely alien globalization emerges. A cyber-utopian, geometric territory shimmers with energy, the calculated agency contained in every unit of culture. The territory is always recombining with itself in new, heterogeneous forms to give shape to the possible futures of culture. This is a detour into globalization as it is anticipated in abstraction. I’ve made a hacking mess of these refined and precious models for which I only half-heartedly apologize. Let us turn the wheel.

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