(Roughly) Daily

Further to a recent post on “seeing like a system” (and in a fashion, to last Monday’s post on misinformation), a provocative essay by Rohit Krishnan…

We’re living through a phase change that is at the root of a lot of our societal problems. It’s the fact that our information networks have become much more dense.

You exist as a node in a network. Other people are other nodes. They send you information, the edges. You process it, you create your own. Information flows in all directions.

There are all sorts of networks. If you imagine all of us as nodes and the information we receive from each other via edges, then the shape of the network defines the type of information that spreads.

When the type of information is extremely tantalising, one that spreads fast, then the whole network gets taken over with that information. And there’s even a tipping point at which the information breaks containment and spreads through the whole network. Here’s an excellent essay on the subject…

When there are a lot of neighbours to which a node is connected, then various types of information spreads much faster through the network. This is called network density, how many edges are connected on average to each node. And increased density means that there’s many more routes by which information can spread.

This is why cities have much higher rates of “cultural transmission” compared to rural areas. Or why in domains like fashion or ideas or innovation or language or even food, the speed of change and variety is much higher in cities. Because each new unit of culture can transmit from person to person so much faster when there are more people it can connect to.

Ok, this is basics about what a network is. But what happens when the entire world gets interconnected such that we’re all connected to each other much more densely? What would have changed in ourselves? Our culture?

Historically, you used to only have a few sources of news or information. Things that percolated through to your network or things you read in the news. Now information comes from all sides, hungry for your attention. And your “processing power” to make sense of this information hasn’t meaningfully changed.

Imagine seeing the world from this vantage point. A blinding array of data streaming at you, standing as a node. Some from near, some from afar. You take it all in, process it, and build up a sense of the world from it, including a sense of the other people and their beliefs reflecting back, from near and far.

If you do this, as a sentient being, you can’t help but develop a world model. A sense of the world, a sense of what others think of the world, perhaps even another layer or two. Even if you develop it only to help speed up the information processing that you need to do. It will be different in structure for each of you, of course, but part of a shared consensus reality nonetheless. A sense made up of all the information that came your way, including the sense you have of all the sense of information that came other people’s way, which helps them process the information flowing their way. Creating a collective sense of what’s going on, a knowledge of the shared reality in which we live.

We call this our culture…

Culture is the digital biosphere we create for ourselves. Culture is the infosphere we all swim in. If you think of the information that we all swap with each other as water, culture is the ocean made up of it, or a distilled version of the most common or communally known parts of that ocean.

Edward Hall, in his books Silent Language and Beyond Culture, writes about how culture is composed of the communication patterns, behaviours, and symbols that are shared amongst a group. We can think of culture as the common interconnected web that underlay the beliefs that we all hold, which constantly changes and evolves as our beliefs spread.

This is especially salient because part of the culture now is filled with efforts of many to escape it. This isn’t new, of course, and have existed since Thoreau. But there is an increase in it. People try tools for thought and software to recommend things or remember things, or AI to remember everything they read and interacted with, all so that there can be a way to deal with the information avalanche.

While this makes sense for an individual, the fact that this collectively defines the information ecosystem around us also means that the problem is on the supply side. This is why there is the rise of private spaces, especially since Twitter’s demise. Hence the theory that we live in the dark forest era of the internet:

Is our universe an empty forest or a dark one? If it’s a dark forest, then only Earth is foolish enough to ping the heavens and announce its presence. The rest of the universe already knows the real reason why the forest stays dark. It’s only a matter of time before the Earth learns as well.

This is also what the internet is becoming: a dark forest.

In response to the ads, the tracking, the trolling, the hype, and other predatory behaviors, we’re retreating to our dark forests of the internet, and away from the mainstream.

The push to create private spaces, on discord or group chats, to truly express oneself or let mini-ecosystems flourish, they all are needed to make us stop sitting with our face deep inside the information superhighway. It’s to help make the networks you’re in a bit sparser.

And my thesis is that almost everything that we see that pushes against the cultural state we used to recognise, is as a result of this densification of our information networks. Whether it is group chats, private forums, discord, smartphones that are not that smart, yearning for the flip phones from Motorola, various tools for thought, AI software to help you focus, better note taking tools, the angst against media headlines, the disbelief in economic and political institutions, the underlying sense of malaise that seemingly everyone feels, the vibes.

And the way we’re interconnected changes the way we see and process information that comes our way, which changes the culture. The form of the network changes the way the network operates.

In the era of superfast many-to-many communication, the ideas that spread are the ones which can “take over” the entire spectrum. Small ideas grow, wither, die. It’s only the memetic megafauna that survive.

In a sparse network you might have pockets which retain their individuality and survive for longer. Like Galapagos syndrome for ideas. Both good and bad.

Letting your ecosystem interact with the external giant internet might mean it will die out or get outcompeted…

…

… The outcome of having a dense network is insidious but powerful. It means only the narratives which can go viral do go viral. The collective epistemic commons becomes filled with those narratives which outcompete the others and muscle their way to the top. It means that at a time of unprecedented low unemployment, high wages, high standard of living, GDP growth, high stock markets, strong dollar, people in the US still think they’re living in the worst of all possible times. An anti-Panglossian sentiment.

It means that everyone is convinced everyone else is having a bad time. We’re surrounded by vibes about everyone’s life getting worse, wars and famine and pestilence and injustice worldwide. We see gaffes and mistakes made by everyone laid bare instantly.

The denser network makes the impact of the message change. It molds itself to the medium.

At some level of interconnectivity, we all fall prey to the weaknesses of information deluge. Our attention is finite and so is our processing capacity for information. You can have the world do a denial of service attack on your cognition by overwhelming it with bits of information, so you’re stuck in place like a fly in amber. And it does this so easily that we haven’t even recognised when it happens let alone how to prevent it.

That too is why we have so many tools for thought, and ways to capture notes to search them afterwards, and tools for doing work about work, and endless lists and notes and contextual reminders and and and … It’s why we yearn for cultural islanding. It’s why there’s the never-ending “current thing”. We’re all left tilting at the windmill of being a node in a dense network…

Dense networks, dark forests: “Seeing Like a Network,” from @krishnanrohit.

(Image above: source)

* “Howard Beale” (Peter Finch), Network

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As we deal with density, we might recall that it was on this date in 1974, at 8:01a, that the bar code made its retail debut: the first OPC-coded item, a ten pack of Wrigley’s chewing gum, was canned at the Marsh supermarket in Troy, Ohio by cashier Sharon Buchanan for customer Clyde Dawson.

Bar codes are now, of course, ubiquitous in retail, but are also widely used in healthcare, transport and logistics, mail, parcel, and baggage handling, and ticketing.