Complexity Theory and Co-opetition at 190 MPH - Finally a Use for NASCAR
Its not often FirstMonday goes into macho stuff like speedway, but this is an interesting piece.

In aerodynamically intense stock-car races like the Daytona 500, the drivers form into multi-car draft lines to gain extra speed. A driver who does not enter a draft line (slipstream) will lose. Once in a line, a driver must attract a drafting partner in order to break out and try to get further ahead. Thus the effort to win leads to ever-shifting patterns of cooperation and competition among rivals. This provides a curious laboratory for several social science theories: (1) complexity theory, since the racers self-organize into structures that oscillate between order and chaos; (2) social network analysis, since draft lines are line networks whose organization depends on a driver's social capital as well as his human capital; and (3) game theory, since racers face a "prisoner's dilemma" in seeking drafting partners who will not defect and leave them stranded. Perhaps draft lines and related "bump and run" tactics amount to a little-recognized dynamic of everyday life, including in structures evolving on the Internet.

I also found this section very interesting. We talk about the signs of things emerging, but not often the signs of things fading away.

Why now? Scott Huler's A Little Bit Sideways: One Week Inside a NASCAR Winston Cup Race Team points to a deeper, cultural reason, as long-time race promoter and track owner H. A. "Humpy" Wheeler, himself struck by NASCAR's awesome growth, speculates that stock-car racing is arousing nation- wide enthusiasm now for the same reason that baseball did likewise decades ago: nostalgia for a passing era. Baseball - a slow, serene game played with a wooden bat, a cloth ball, and cowhide mitts on a broad, grassy field - surged in popularity just when the industrial revolution was taking hold, leaving masses of urban workers and shopkeepers yearning for the pastoral peace and quiet of the fabled agricultural age. They could relive this for a day by attending a baseball game. By extension, no wonder stock-car racing - a fast, furious sport contended on a paved roadway with snarling, smelly machines operated by hand - is surging in popularity at the very time the computerized information revolution is transforming our society from top to bottom. Stock-car racing expresses the industrial age more than does any big sport in America. Even NASCAR's efforts to present itself as a sport built around god-fearing, family-oriented drivers who bring their own wives and kids to the track plays into this. Go to a Winston Cup race and get away from all the new revolutions wracking America.

Sometimes, perhaps often, the apotheosis is the precursor of its disappearance. Very often political ends are foreshadowed by ever more desperately violent attempts to enforce a dying status quo. It happened in China as Mao's revolution was dying, it happened in Romania and in Yugoslavia. As we approach another paroxysm of violence, we must ask what is going to emerge from the smoke and fog, but also, what is fading into them.