Strategic Surprise Unlimited, the Library’s operational arm is headquartered in a sinking palazzo in Venice, considered one of the oldest cities of the future on Earth.
The doctrine of Strategic Surprise was inspired by ARPA — the Advanced Research Projects Agency, founded in 1958 in response to Sputnik on the principle that the only defense against being surprised by a competitor was to surprise yourself first. The Library generalized the principle. The real threat, the new doctrine held, was not military. It was conceptual rigidity and perceptual continuity — the failure of an entire civilization to notice that the impossible had quietly become improbable, and the improbable was about to become inevitable. The job of Strategic Surprise was to live in Pasteur’s Quadrant, where curiosity-driven research and use-driven application were the same activity, and to move the impossible toward the inevitable on purpose, before someone else did it by accident.
A polymath who could do this regularly — who could leap between domains, who carried analogies in their hands, who saw hidden patterns and matched them to ideas they had figured out in another chapter of their own life — exhibited what the Society came to call **deep craft**. Deep craft was not a synonym for expertise. Expertise was vertical. Deep craft was lateral and embodied. It was what happened when an attuned maker had spent enough time in enough cooperatives that their mind had become capable of carrying the discipline of one tradition into the room of another and watching what bloomed.
Deep craft was rare. Strategic Surprise Unlimited was founded on the core principle that the must urgent and important challenges of the century ahead, live, not in any one domain or discipline, but in the places in-between. We are anti-disciplinary with a bias towards action.