My friend and I are discussing the hilarity of ‘People You May Know’ suggestions on Facebook. He hates Facebook, he is grumpy, he is annoyed that I’ve just called ‘People You May Know’ a comedy show (he takes his comedy shows seriously). The suggestions for the day irritate him: the director of an unremarkable Hindi film; a well-known writer; a man who shares the name of his close friend. I don’t know any of them, of course. But by the logic in which Facebook operates, I could soon be ‘friends’ with these three men, all strangers. From our amateur understanding of Facebook’s rationale for throwing these suggestions our way every day, we put it to the only familiar detail that accompanies the profiles of strangers in these tiny boxes: that entry ticket called ‘mutual friends’.

Suddenly it strikes me that Facebook, now the highest populated space in the world, ahead of China and India, is only a couple of years away from ensuring that every person in the world has at least one — it’s never one, but several — common friend with any person in the world. This might seem like a fantasy — until a few years ago, it’d have been a fantasy for my friend Parama to have a single ‘mutual friend’ with Farhan Akhtar; now she knows him second-hand, through a mutual friend, as we do most of our Facebook contacts, never able to separate the honey from the hive.

But to return to my epiphany. We are all supposed to be descendants of an African Eve, I tell my friend. So we are all related to each other, we are all a part of the same family. And soon, knowing my high gravitational energy for plant life, he says something about the ‘family tree’. It’s a phrase we use casually — we use it to illustrate genealogy, this always attended by some subtle exhibition of pride but also of wonder, that the blood of these strangers should flow in our veins. The tree, we know without really being told, is an easy diagrammatic tool to represent all kinds of knowledge systems, from inconsequential details about ancestors to divisions in the plant and animal world to even the seemingly innocent menu card you read in a restaurant.

Manuel Lima, in his fantastic study of the tree as a diagrammatic tool in The Book of Trees: Visualizing Branches of Knowledge , gives rich examples of how the tree became “one of the most popular, captivating, and widespread visual archetypes”, “with deep roots in cartography, the illumination of manuscripts, and medieval visual exegesis”, and also the “seminal predecessors of modern-day network visualizations”, whether as primeval diagrams that resemble trees or abstract tree charts, “where given nodes, entities, or “leaves” are tied across different levels by links, edges, or “branches”’. The family tree or the structure of the workplace, a bus route chart or the organisation of files and folders in our phones and computers — all of these come from the tree model.

In the semi-comic and fantastic post-Facebook world that I am imagining, where everyone has at least one ‘mutual friend’ with every other person on the planet, the old tree-model will not work. In this new world — ‘Friends are the family we choose for ourselves’ is a T-shirt anthem that is worn as jersey on occasions like Friendship Day, for instance — the ‘network’ of relationships come not from blood but from the accidents of meetings, in school, university, the workplace, travel and, most often, through an algorithm in the virtual space that none of us has any control over. In that it is like the pre-contraceptive age, slightly beyond human control.

The replacement of blood or DNA by technology in this new order of relationships — of the African Eve as mother of all human progeny by artificial intelligence, which tries to make things look as random as falling in love with a stranger but is actually governed by a scheming data-miner — will perhaps need a new model to replace the tree. I am beginning to wonder whether it was prescience that made Deleuze and Guattari make a passionate case for the ginger-like rhizome to replace the “organizational structure of the root-tree system” in their book A Thousand Plateaus . “Any point of a rhizome can be connected to any other, and must be.” “The planar movement of the rhizome resists chronology and organization, instead favouring a nomadic system of growth and propagation.”

I suspect — with the kind of suspicion that only an amateur is capable of cultivating — that the new world where everyone is everyone’s friend or certainly everyone’s ‘mutual friend’ is where the hierarchy of the arborescent model has been replaced by the rhizome. In this world, Amitabh Bachchan and my five-year-old nephew are related — both are leaves of grass.

(Treelogy is a new monthly column about plant life, aesthetics, politics, and memory)

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