Unflattening

Sousanis borrows the idea of flatness from Abbot’s novel Flatland, which features characters who are completely unaware of those who perceive the world in higher dimensions. Expanding on this, Sousanis defines flatness as a homogenization of thought and experience that precludes other potential points of view. For Sousanis, perception, experience, and action are acutely related. Therefore, a person who sees the world as a series of linear systems will play their role in ensuring that that world survives for future generations.

While Sousanis begins with flatness, his book models a process of incremental unflattening, leading the reader through a sequence of “dimensions” that are increasingly distant from their daily routine. This process is necessarily incomplete, however; Sousanis emphasizes that unflattening requires curiosity and an awareness that our perception is limited and always stands to gain more depth.

The idea of stereoscopic vision is an important one for Sousanis’s book. The term refers to the mechanics of human vision: The distance between our eyes means that each of them sees a slightly different picture. Our brain then has to make sense of the pictures to arrive at a consistent image. Importantly, this discrepancy between each eye’s viewpoint means that “[T]here is no correct view” (Location 44), and that “[S]eeing, much like walking on two feet, is a constant negotiation between two distinct sources” (Location 44).