Author Steven Johnson is in Seattle on October 6 & 7, for readings at the University Village Barnes & Noble (7:30 p.m., 10/6) and Words & Wine at the Sorrento Hotel (7 p.m., 10/7).

In an earlier day, author Steven Johnson might have been called a philosopher. His predilection for thinking about thinking undergirds Everything Bad Is Good for You, Emergence, Mind Wide Open, Ghost Map, and The Invention of Air. And let’s remember that not all philosophers wrote like Kant.

Johnson’s mode of inquiry is derived is no small part from the Socratic school, which took place in the Athenian market. It’s both a questioning of the way we live now, and an explosive confrontation with conventional wisdom.

You could mistake some of Johnson’s work for journalism, understandably. He often uses journalism as a way to think about things. But his essays are bait for the bigger fish that he reels in, book-length. Rather than worry about what video games don’t teach kids, Johnson asks what they do teach, in order to learn about learning. He pokes around in the brain’s wetware itself to showcase the difference between the objective and subjective experiences of mind. In the cases of John Snow and Joseph Priestley, his biographical case studies examine the distance between consensus and investigation.

Now he’s back with Where Good Ideas Come From, which contains his now-trademark reversal of preconceptions. The archetypes of the “lone genius” and a “eureka” moment are the first casualties of Johnson’s work; he’s realized that we celebrate people with big ideas the same way we celebrate billionaires–as if the result is inherently individual. But to date no one has become a billionaire without an economy. So which is more important?

Johnson opens the book with an introduction called “Reef, City, Web” in which he sets up his central point that environment shapes and drives creativity. He’s construing environment broadly, not just in terms of physical surroundings and resources, but in terms of patterns of connectivity.

That’s why he ends up talking about Stuart Kauffman’s “adjacent possible”–on the one hand this explains why some inventors (meet Charles Babbage) are known as ahead of their time, but (cue Johnson reversal) it also highlights the way that our most amazing ideas have “been cobbled together with spare parts that happened to be sitting in the garage.”

“What the adjacent possible tells us is that at any moment the world is capable of extraordinary change, but only certain changes can happen,” sums up Johnson.

This is typical of the book, a new level of precision, as if you just racheted the diopter a turn. The gross outlines of innovation–which you thought connected to form a genius inventor in his workshop–turn out to include variation upon variation: there are decades-long “slow hunches” as insights wait for the right question to form, serendipitous combinations (now managed by software), fruitful mistakes, exaptations (the punch card was invented in the early 1800s), and places for minds to congregate and ideas to collide (coffee houses, salons, Homebrew Computing Clubs).

Along the way, you learn about Gutenberg and Tim Berners-Lee, the birth of GPS, coral reefs, Miles Davis’s trumpet, HDTV, Brian Eno’s loops, vacuum tubes, and the water flea Daphnia. I suspect this teeming ideational life is part and parcel of Johnson’s deep structure–he wants his books not simply to be about the topic, but to recreate the salient experience in some way.

The book’s envoi is drawn from the preceding chapters; it’s a personal invitation to invite more creativity into your own life. It also reads like a 21st century Tao:

Go for a walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down, but keep your folders messy; embrace serendipity; make generative mistakes; take on multiple hobbies; frequent coffeehouses and other liquid networks; follow the links; let others build on your ideas; borrow, recycle, reinvent. Build a tangled bank.