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Dave Kawalec

I want to delve a bit more deeply into the concept of orders of organization that Weinberger talks about. The First Order is the physical. Knowledge is condensed into a readable form in books. Books are physical objects comprised of atoms and are thus bound to the laws of physics. They have to exist at some point in space and at some point in time. They can’t occupy the same space as any other object. A group of books can only be arranged on a shelf in one way at any one time. So, you may line the books on your shelf up by alphabetical order by author, or you may organize them by subject, title, height, thickness, whatever you want — you can pick any method of organization you want, but you can only pick one. This is the First Order of organization. The Dewey Decimal System (which Weinberger spends a great many pages discussing) describes one way to physically organize books in a library.