Missing Socks

Friday, September 23, 2005

For anyone who has ever been troubled by the lone sock left at the end of the laundry, help is on the way, and it comes in the form of indignation: Who ever said socks had to come in pairs? At least that is the rebellious philosophy of one sock manufacturer who is single handedly trying to change the way we see the sock problem. "The missing sock is never going to go away," said one of the company's founders. "This is a way to really have fun with a real-world problem: that people lose their socks… Let's embrace the problem, and run with it." Currently they have in circulation over 600,000 socks, all sold without matches in packages of 1, 3, or 7.

Type A personalities aside, the embracing of mismatched socks is catching on quickly. I happen to think the idea is clever, particularly among the target market (girls age 9-13), but I also think it is one more logical outworking of the current philosophical frame of mind. "Imbalance by design—and the studied quirkiness it reveals—is everywhere," notes one cultural observer. "Random is the new order," declares another product aimed at teens. Whether selling music or socks, in the constant undertow of marketing, the spirit and mood of the age can be felt.

Leon Lederman, the physicist and Nobel laureate, once jokingly remarked that the real goal of physics was to come up with an equation that could explain the universe but still be small enough to fit on a T-shirt. With this challenge in mind, Oxford scientist Richard Dawkins offered up his own T-shirt slogan: "Life results from the non-random survival of randomly varying replicators." The universe, he insists, has neither design nor purpose; it exhibits nothing but blind pitiless indifference.

But if the universe has always been a disordered series of time plus matter plus chance, how do we account for the intricate orderedness to life, the uniformity of nature, the very intricacy of the mind that asks this question? How can we believe in the non-random consistency of nature in a random world? What would it really look like if random was the new order? Even in the nonconforming concept of mismatched socks, the factories making them still exhibit a scrupulous degree of order; each random sock is designed and produced with creativity and intent.

Blogged on 2:29 AM by Upay

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