The Social Labs Revolution

6The Rise of the Agilistas

Sometimes at Edwards they used to play the tapes of pilots going into the final dive, the one that killed them, and the man would be … screaming into the microphone, but not for Mother or for God or the nameless spirit of Ahor, but for one last hopeless crumb of information about the loop: “I’ve tried A! I’ve tried B! I’ve tried C! I’ve tried D! Tell me what else I can try!” And then that truly spooky click on the machine. What do I do next?

— Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff

In reflecting on the labs we ran, it became clear that first-generation social labs suffered a serious challenge. We called this the challenge of the right-hand side, which referred to the right-hand side of the U Process, concerned with realizing or ...