What’s in it for me? Question your most basic ideas about the internet to save the world.
Mark Zuckerberg declared the purpose of Facebook was to “strengthen our social fabric and bring the world closer together.” But just over a decade into the rise of social media, our social fabric is crumbling, claims of “fake news” are everywhere, and vital issues like climate change or wealth inequality are now argued in memes. Humans are actually overproducing media content that only benefits the rich, while ignoring the real cost of all those devices on the natural world and society. Worse still, we’re feeling more isolated and less fulfilled than ever, and there’s no clear way out.
If your own online life has you feeling lonely, purposeless, and overwhelmed, you are far from alone– but does it have to be this way?
These Blinks will challenge some of the most deeply held beliefs on the history of computing, the dawn of the internet, and the rise of social media. Because understanding how world wide webs of communication have always existed, why the industrial and digital revolutions actually happened at the same time, and what kinds of information algorithms feed us, you can make wiser decisions about how to spend your screen time.
You’re the product.
Social media is a new kind of exploitation. While companies or businesses used to capitalize on labor or natural resources to turn a profit, this new industry exploits a totally new resource to make money: personal data from its users.
Social media platforms invest in massive research projects to refine the algorithms they use to organize and show content. For platforms like YouTube or Instagram, their algorithms can use billions and billions of user data points to get better at showing you content they think you’d like to see based on what you’ve already seen. Oh, and as private corporations, they do all of this for profit, and without much government oversight or regulation.
They do all of this for one simple reason: to keep you hooked, long past the time you swore you’d put down your phone and do something meaningful. Each tap or swipe is another nibble of useful data for them. At the same time, every “like” or “share” on your own TikTok or Insta posts sends a little hit of dopamine to your brain, and the cycle continues. You might even blame yourself and your lack of discipline for all that wasted screen time, too. You’ll vow never to mindlessly scroll again, but spoiler alert: you will.
The trend only got worse with the rise of portable devices like smartphones and tablets. Now users could offer up their data 24-7, wherever they went. So from attending a work meeting, paying bills, swiping on Tinder or calling your Mom, your participation in much of life now happens through a single device.
Since everything is online these days – from job portals to dating sites – you’re encouraged to think of yourself along these same lines. No more applying for a position or wooing a love interest. Market yourself to employers or partners so they’ll smash that like button. Don’t have a personality, have a profile—without quirks, surprises, contradictions, or mysteries.
And so, given that life is more complicated than a hashtag, you have to diminish yourself to fit the algorithm. When this becomes easy, you might forget that there are other humans out there who interpret the me you put out online. While a heated Facebook debate might seem harmless, online arguments now spill over into the rest of life—dividing families, polarizing politics, and costing real lives.
As you watch the world through your device, your device can watch you, too. The internet also functions as a new form of global surveillance, with smart devices listening in to homes, cars, workplaces and schools. They can track where you go and who else is there, even how many steps you took along the way.
So, next we’ll take on some of the biggest myths surrounding the internet, and a few of its dark realities. We’ll look for the roots of the online revolution in history, biology, philosophy and mathematics– in order to uncover how we got into this mess, and what we have to do to get out.
Algorithms filter reality, but so do brains.
Since the days of the abacus, humans have sought to outsource computation to machines. By the 1670s, German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz dreamt of outsourcing even more. What if, instead of numbers, difficult decisions could be outsourced to “concept-crunching machines” that would weigh all the variables to predict outcomes, and then choose the best one? Such machines could solve conflict and facilitate world peace—and they would leave human beings free to pursue art, science, or civic life.
But if Twitter wars have proven anything, it is that Leibniz was very optimistic.
While artificial intelligence, or AI, can do many things online—bots can generate convincing chat, steal your passwords, even harass you. But they lack the greatest resource of the digital age: they can’t pay attention.
That’s because attention is a complex topic. First, let’s quickly talk about perception. Perception is your awareness of sensory data from your environment - like how hot or cold your room is, how comfy (or not) your chair is, that sort of thing. Attention, though, is what you choose to focus on while you’re in that room, in that chair. So attention is a prioritization, a filter, a choice you make about what you’re doing or thinking. It is considered a sign of consciousness, of inherent self-hood.
But if attention involves selection – what are we selecting from? Perception has been thought of as the awareness of what’s around you without a filter, and what Leibniz calls, apperception, to have the awareness that you’re aware. Both are in play in the idea of consciousness before choice can be made.
A musician on the stage or an athlete on the field might perceive that their bodies are moving in complex ways to accomplish their art, they’re likely not paying much attention to this. The musician is attending to the music, the athlete to the game. Paying too much attention to their choices might even fling them out of their flow state and it all comes crashing down.
Modern neuroscience shows that given the sheer amount of input our brains have to process at any one time, our perception is already severely limited. While we may think of our conscious awareness as complete—our brains are filtering machines. We are selecting before we’re even aware, or aware that we’re doing it.
And, while there is an infinite amount of information available to you in the nearest tree, or grassy meadow, or local creek, your lack of attention to this information probably doesn’t bother you. It’s only in the internet economy, where the extraction of attention through an engine designed to drive you toward the next sponsored post, or in-app purchase, that your attention is at a premium. Online, your attention is artificially limited and channelled for the sake of profit.
But not all networks are that way.
The idea of a world wide web is ancient and all around us.
If all this discussion of the global, attention-seeking digital economy has you blaming the technology that made it possible, you might want to hang on for just a moment. Because while it is easy to think of the internet as a lifeless tool that endlessly sucks up attention, it is just as easy to think of it as a living system. Or at the very least, the natural product of a living system—us.
Signals are everywhere in nature and don’t need cables for transmission. The birds tweeting above you or those dogs barking in the distance? Signals. An elephant’s stomp sending low rumbles through the earth to its elephant relatives miles away? Another signal. The smell of jasmine, the trails of ants, the vibration of a spider's web—and on and on.
What they all have in common is that these signals are being sent through specific channels, and that they are intended for another being to interpret them. Whether chemicals passed along mycorrhizal fungal networks from plant to plant, or whale clicks resonating across the ocean, our natural world is full of social communication networks broadcasting 24 hours a day. Behind each signal is a complex process of sensation processing, choice and action even on the part of the humblest of creatures.
Consider the humble slime mould, or Physarum polycephalum, which scientists studying transportation have used to model potential new train routes. By placing bits of food on a 3D map of a city, say Tokyo, and you place it at points where you’d like to build a station , a slime mould placed on the map will quickly grow along the most efficient route from station to station. Skirting around natural obstacles like mountains. They do this without a brain, or nervous system, or anything resembling what humans think of as intelligence—and they do it better than AI.
We humans have a long history of believing our consciousness to be special. Instead of seeing cognition reflected everywhere around us in the natural world, we hold ourselves as separate from it.
We also tend not to compare slime moulds to artificial intelligence because slime moulds take time. They don’t work in the milliseconds we now expect our computations to run. But the unquestioned assumption that faster equals better in communication, as in computation, is an idea worth examining more in the next chapter.
Humans are telecommunicators.
What makes human long distance communication different from plants and animals is that ours requires devices to send signals, and devices to receive and interpret those signals. In this way, telecommunication is a sort of amplification of a signal by means of technology.
Imagine what information might have been exchanged along the trade routes of the neolithic age— around 60 thousand years ago. What languages, customs or knowledge could be gleaned by traders along the Silk Road, for instance? What kinds of information did they share along with their exotic goods and wares in the marketplace?
Consider the Mexica, more commonly known as Aztec, tradition of running. While running served a ritual and ceremonial purpose as well, its practical advantages were plentiful. Messages could travel along hundreds of miles as fast as feet could fly. In some cultures, such messages were memorized, carried in the mind of the messenger and communicated with their very breath. This information was alive. So sacred was telecommunication in human history that many cultures say omniscience—or instantaneous knowing—is a trait of gods.
With each transportation innovation, from horses to ships to trains to aeroplanes, our messages travelled further and faster, amplifying our signal. Thus was born the association between speed and progress. But when the highest form of progress is speed, something was lost along the way.
Receiving a message from far away in prehistoric times meant a personal encounter with an outsider. They had a physical presence, a smell, a look. They might have worn odd clothes, eaten strange food or held strange beliefs. They might also have introduced you to new philosophies or ways of thinking.
All that extra information was already lost with the advent of a postal system, and yet even today a hand-written letter feels more significant somehow than an SMS. An in-person visit is down-right memorable. As this hyper valuation of speed in communication continued throughout the last century. The effects have wiped out the memory of such expanded interaction.
The natural world: a simulation?
While our devices require manufacturing, energy and resources to create and connect, the nature we see around us just grows that way, right? Well, not quite.
When conquerors and colonists alike first landed on North American shores, they saw the landscape as savage and untamed. But talk to the people living there, and it was a completely different story. Indigenous peoples in North America had long histories of landscape management—from cutting trees and controlled burning to the spreading of food plants.
Today, too, most of the people who might be considered to live in a less technology-driven, or so-called natural state, do not view the world around them as an untamed wilderness either, but an environment that reflects their own shaping, effort and care. For instance, the Ituri Rainforest people of central Africa, called the Mbuti, sing to the forest to heal it, to thank it for food or celebrate milestones and joys. They are in constant communication with their environment, see their ancestors as the builders and shapers of their world, and themselves as its caretakers. Like any modern city, their infrastructure is maintained through constant labour and oversight.
Seeing modern cities as artificial and mankind apart from nature creates other dangerous blind spots that sometimes lead backwards. In recent years, the idea of the universe as simulation has become a popular philosophical debate. If mankind developed to the point of attempting to create artificial intelligence, then surely other beings must have done so already. If the universe is ancient and infinite, how could anyone be sure that our consciousness doesn’t arise from a simulation “running” on some alien machine?
This thinking is closer to mediaeval theology than modern science, because projecting human desires and cognition onto the universe reveals the biases in our thinking. First, the idea that computational intelligence – that’s the ability to run a simulation – is the highest form of intelligence to which a civilization might aspire. Oddly enough, for Leibniz – who we met earlier when we talked about outsourcing computational intelligence to machines. He thought computation was a barrier to intelligence. A chore that had to be completed before the real thinking could begin.
It also implies that sufficient computational intelligence might become conscious. But to imagine that would take a much better understanding of what consciousness is. In other words, consciousness might come about from algorithmic processes, but humans are a very long way from proving that. Given that neuroscience is equally far from understanding what conscious awareness is, or how it works within the structures of a living being, the idea of conscious machines might be a real one, but we have absolutely no way of knowing.
In other words, while we know them inside and out, we do not have what 16th century English Philosopher Francis Bacon would call “a maker’s knowledge” of the human mind.
Why making silk is connected to the internet.
Returning to the opening quote about Facebook’s purpose to “strengthen our social fabric and bring the world closer together.” While both the metaphors he uses are long established ones, they’re still metaphors: society is not a fabric and telecommunications do not shrink the planet.
So, let’s get a bit philosophical. We might just as well start from another, equally ancient metaphor. While today it is no longer fashionable to think about the world or even the universe as a single, living body, this thought has deep roots in many cultures. The Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius urged his readers to think of the Universe as a single, living being possessed of a single soul. Panpsychist traditions see soul or consciousness in everything—from subatomic particles to the universe itself. The ancient Indian Upanishads describe the world as “woven in water like warp and woof.” But weaving brings us back to Zuckerberg’s quote in an unexpected way.
How interesting, then, that our information processing machines developed right alongside weaving. While they might seem totally unrelated, the history of computers is, at some points, actually the history of looms. In 1808, French inventor Joseph Marie Jacquard introduced the world to his new automated loom. It could transfer any design and weave it in silk, once the design was “programmed” onto a set of punch cards. The punch cards were based on the earlier experiments of Jacques de Vaucanson from all the way back in 1725.
For as long as people have been manufacturing patterned silk, they’ve been thinking about ways to harness automation. Leibniz developed a plan to fund a scientific society through the revenue from his patent for silk manufacture in 1703 in Berlin. It was in describing these automated weaving punch card systems that humans started talking about zeros and ones. And so binary code, or machine language, was born.
Mathematician Charles Babbage wanted to harness this technology through an Analytical Engine which could in essence perform solely mathematical functions using the punch card system. In the early 1830s, Ada Augusta Lovelace was eagerly seeking out Babbage to join in the work. Ada was a British mathematician and daughter of the poet Lord Byron and mathematician Anne Milbanke. A revolutionary figure in early computer science, Lovelace’s broad and unique intelligence meant that she, better than any contemporary, understood the overlapping workings of both weaving and computers.
But even more, her vision first sparked the notion of computers as potential world building—the idea we might one day have a “maker’s knowledge” of new, albeit mechanical, minds. And that by using them, we extend our intellectual abilities infinitely.
Final summary
You’ve just listened to our Blink to The Internet is Not What You Think It Is, by Justin E. H. Smith.
The rise of the internet and social media was fast, and the pandemic accelerated the pace at which people around the world experienced their lives online. So the important ideas to remember from this title are that now, more than ever, it's crucial to understand that you are the product for social media platforms, and they’re designed to keep you using. The internet is not as new, as “high tech” or as democratic as you thought - and it isn’t helping you thrive, either. If you never make it past the Wiki page, you might not notice that the industrial and digital revolutions happened at the same time, and that neither set us above or apart from the natural world, either. The world is full of webs, and signals, and networks all vital to our survival. Understanding and connecting with the ancient and natural roots of human communication can help us refocus our ideas about the internet, and make wiser choices about our screen time.
And so here is some very Actionable Advice: Read a Book.
In a world where attention is a commodity, choosing how to spend yours is a radical act of self-reclamation. If the ideas you encountered here surprised you, explore them more by reading. Curious about Ada Lovelace? Grab a biography. Fascinated by elephant stomps? Read up on animal behaviour. Don’t know where to start? Try your local library. And while you’re there, say hi to the folks behind the reference desk, too, they’re friendly, and they’re your neighbours.
Thank you so much for listening, and I hope that you found these thoughts worthy of your attention. Let us know by giving this Blink a rating, and leaving any other feedback you’d like to share. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy other titles in our Blinkist library, too, and I look forward to your attentive ears in the next Blink.