Path Dependence

In January 1994, a magnitude 6.7 earthquake violently shook the San Fernando valley near Los Angeles and awakened people before dawn. Legend has it that in the immediate aftermath people called emergency services, not simply because the power was out and they were experiencing an emergency, which the Northridge quake certainly was, but people apparently called 911 because they wanted to ask about a "strange, silvery cloud" in the sky.

There are verified reports that people called local observatories to inquire about the phenomenon. It turns out, people living within southern California's suburban sprawl, and it's corresponding light pollution, were unaccustomed to seeing the Milky Way.

Growing up in rural Eastern Kentucky where the nearest interstate highway is more than 2 hours away, I've marveled at the night sky for as long as I can remember. As a teenager I worked for a natural gas drilling and pipeline company, often working long days, which in the colder months meant we'd be out in the mountains well after dark. Sometimes after we'd packed up the job site I'd ask the guys to turn off all the lights. The crew usually protested and made fun of me, because I guess rural roughnecks don't typically want to spend extra time just to appreciate the little, softer things, but sometimes they would also accept the intimate invitation. Maybe none of us can ever fully appreciate just how lucky we are, but I hope to never take for granted being able to see the celestial.

More than 100 years before the Northridge quake, another example of technology shaping human experience is the adoption of the now ubiquitous QWERTY keyboard. Several theories exist as to why the QWERTY arrangement was adapted, as opposed to say alphabetical order. These theories include that early typewriters jammed easily, so manufacturers designed a complicated layout to slow down keystrokes. Another theory, my personal favorite, is that because early typewriter salesmen didn't know how to type (had a method even been invented yet?), the manufacturers wanted to make it easier for the salesmen to demonstrate the product, so if you look at your keyboard, you'll see all the letters of the word 'typewriter' living right there in the top row.

Regardless of QWERTY's exact origins, it seems significant that how we type, something we do often every day, is still inextricable from business decisions made by people over a century ago. Some might call this phenomenon "path dependency."

Some social scientists have even studied the names of children born since the mass adoption and usage of QWERTY keyboards, setting their parameters somewhere in the 1990s. They concluded that since then, the most popular names are spelled mostly with letters typed using the right hand.

Speaking of path dependency and literal paths, some people theorize that the width specifications of most railroads in North America are a direct result of the Roman Empire. Though I don't mean to be passé, it does make sense, because until the invention of the railroad, for 4000 years the chariot was the fastest form of human transportation. And as empire expanded, Roman chariots created ruts in the roads, so other manufacturers built their chariots and wagons to meet the specifications which would make travel easiest. Theoretically it stands to reason that these ancient dimensions might affect modern day manufacturing, influencing everything from the width of railroad tracks to the width of lanes on an interstate highway, and by extension, the size of anything being transported via this infrastructure.

Speaking of infrastructure, consider urban development before and after the proliferation of the automobile. Major cities in the Eastern US, many of which became well developed before cars were popular, are much more dense and easy to walk around. Cities in the Western US, some of which are older than the car but much of their development occurred in conjunction with it, are much more sprawled and the spaces are designed to accommodate cars. That's path dependency.

That is not to say that every decision we make is 100% deterministic of our fate, and as they say hindsight is 20/20. But having lived through (and currently living in) the 4th Industrial Revolution (4IR), aka Industry 4.0, did any of us regular folk predict a quarter of a century ago that human civilization would now be what some people have described as a "distributed network of cyborgs"?

Like it or not, a device in our pocket, on our wrist, or in our face means that humans are part of the IoT (internet of things). This fact of the matter is welcome news for state entities like the Chinese Communist Party, which implements a social credit system, nurtured by an omnipresent surveillance state, to leverage the IoT to socially engineer human behavior. People constantly connected to the IoT also enables mechanisms such as Israel's Gospel and Lavender to leverage machines to determine human targets to strike with martial means and the probabilities of the resulting collateral damage. The implication being that we now live in a world where it is easier to destroy someone's reputation or their home or to end their life than it is to erase their digital footprints.

This IoT, and modern humans as a distributed network of cyborgs, was not intentionally created by a shadowy cabal in some sinister conspiracy conducted for complete control and surveillance of the majority of humans. No, anticlimactically it is simply the confused byproduct of humanity's nature to connect and consume.

Though it does raise the chicken or egg question, what came first: humans' need to connect and consume...? or corporate capitalization and the resulting configuration of our modern social experience? Supply and demand are... well, perhaps a conversation for another time...

In their book, 'Cybersecurity and Cyberwar: What everyone needs to know' the authors claim William Gibson coined the term "cyberspace." They said, "Gibson first used the word, an amalgam of 'cybernetics' and 'space,' in a 1982 short story. He defined it two years later in his genre-revolutionizing novel 'Neuromancer' as, 'A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation... A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system.'" That explanation is astute, and impressive, especially for circa 1984.

In the social media era, that "consensual hallucination" often becomes a collective psychosis, a folie à deux. 'Folie à deux,' translated from French as folly of two, is defined as: "a rare disorder in which delusional beliefs are transferred from one person to another in a close relationship." Cursory web searches also return the concept as: "a rare psychiatric syndrome." But in a globalized era of everything viral, from dance battles, to daredevil challenges, to virtual viruses, to actual biological viruses, an era where some people's closest relationships exist solely within the confines of cyberspace, are shared psychoses really so rare?

In the early 2000's, at the City College of San Francisco, my English professor had us read a book titled 'Hystories' (notice the spelling with a y) which essentially posited that stories about alien abduction and claims from Gulf War syndrome to Yuppie Flu were forms of hysteria. At the time I could not fully digest the thesis, but it has stuck with me; as I also have noticed the number of entries on the Wikipedia page for "mass hysteria" have steadily increased over the years. If you have a curiosity for oddities, I recommend a look at that page.

I'm no doctor so I won't speculate whether or not Gulf War syndrome is mass hysteria. However, as a netizen I do suspect that the most profitable technology companies exploiting attention spans are selling weapons of mass distraction.

To be sure, I'm not here to play advocatus diaboli to anyone's prosperity gospel, because without the profit motive we may not even have the wheel. It's just that I think it's important to highlight (most of us hopefully already know) that generally speaking, "free" services exploit the user. For free services we pay attention, and interact and create content, inadvertently sharing our intimate psychosocial metrics with corporations selling advertising, while inevitably making hay to feed data hungry AI models.

So on that note, it is also important to understand that many of those same cyber services have been instrumental in shaping the world for the better as well. Internet services and more specifically social media, have connected literally billions of people, further democratized knowledge, and facilitated ready access to a global marketplace of ideas, not to mention facilitated revolutions, such as the Arab Spring and other civilization alterations with more ambiguous interpretations.

Our constant connectedness yields a practically infinite supply of metrics with which we can study humans to our own benefit revealing facts about humanity that we may not otherwise know. For example, medical specialists can achieve early detection of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease through analyzing the patters in which people move a desktop mouse. Perhaps even more intimately, we know that places which tend to be more conservative and religious, such as Utah, consume more pornography per capita, a trend which is more pronounced when the genre is specified. For instance, gay porn is more popular in the Bible Belt.

These metrics are elicited from our online habits, data freely posted in social media, including in dating apps by users creating profiles hoping to find a sexual partner in real life (IRL), Christian Mingle being an interesting example. Is there anything more ironic than a business that leverages a proprietary algorithm engineered specifically to match the adherents of a religion advocating for faith in a higher power? Whatever happened to "Jesus take the wheel"?

But this antithetical existence is common among us netizens, because in the information age too often we conflate our personal tastes with what's fed to us. The same way retailers put junk food front and center, because a merchant will always want to move high profit margin products, social media feeds the tasty stuff which gets the most attention=advertising=profit.

Suppliers create demand, and the hammer shapes the hand.

Personalized advertising algorithms provide a window to our collective soul, or rather a mirror, and as we tend to project our worst fears and greatest desires, the realizations in the mirror become a sort of deus ex machina.

We humans are as easily manipulated as we are mystified. We seem to need a savior, and we worship innovators as well as the innovations. At best we anthropomorphize machines as "intelligent" and at worst our consensual hallucination is the deification of these machinations, further enabling us to remove the responsibility from ourselves for our own fate.

If technology is our rapture, then why does it feel like we're always being left behind?

Our fate is in our hands, literally. Like a monkey caught in a trap, all it would take is letting go and we could remove our fist.

The same mechanisms that have had the tendency to divide us, are the same ones that were originally designed to unite us. And although they've been hijacked by cartel corporations, they still can be used for good, but we must understand how the hammer shapes the hand.

If you want to warm your heart, stop consuming content from blathering pundits and instead read the comments on the videos of your favorite music, they're overwhelmingly positive.

In 1997 at a programmers conference in San Francisco, Eric Schmidt, (who would later become the CEO of Google) said, "The Internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn't understand, the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had."

The world wide web has certainly kept its promise to democratize knowledge, and pure democracy is anarchy. The internet started as a proverbial Tower of Babel, high minded aims of uniting humanity in an attempt to either reach God or replace him/them. And like the Tower of Babel there's been some unintended side effects; anarchy, chaos, and division.

And now, in the information age, we are experiencing another Biblical paradigm: a great flood... of data.

According to the book 'Spies, Lies, and Algorithms' the amount of information on Earth doubles every year. Despite being the most plentiful and renewable resource on the planet, somehow data is worth more than oil. And we're drowning in it.

Artificial intelligence could be the ark, and that's certainly what anyone with patented leverage hopes you believe, because they are poised to profit.

And truly AI is as significant an innovation as the personal computer and the internet itself, both of which have revolutionized the global economy and fundamentally changed the everyday lives of nearly every human being.

And this technology, like the others, will be coopted by cartel corporations. Hype helps. It sells products and processes, machines and machinations.

But the price of our tools often does not reflect their economic potential. A $500 smart phone is essentially the same tool as a $1500 smart phone, which can sometimes have less computing power than a $400 laptop. And any one of those devices can help you build wealth, or steal your time, depending on how you use it. The hammer shapes the hand.

I could keep blathering on, but this essay needs to end. I'm amazed if you've read this far and appreciative even if you just scrolled to the bottom to see if it's worth it.

Remember in the beginning when I mentioned path dependency? Well that's the point here. We have to be careful of what we're creating now, right now, because it will influence our future.

How do we want to influence our future? And while the deepfakes won't be quite good enough to fool people in the next election, they will get better, and people will get smarter. But 10 years from now when kids ask the internet to suggest a healthy snack I'd rather one of the responses not be Tide pod.

AI will turn the internet from a salad bowl to a melting pot.

... for better or worse. AI could render the internet unusable as the vast majority of future content will be synthetic. Already AI companies are training their models with "synthetic data" while simultaneously attempting to leverage regulatory capture.

That's a conversation for another time. Just remember, we may be drowning in data/information, but we seem to need more wisdom. So let's cherish what's actually closer to us, not our devices showing something thousands of miles away in the past, but our family and friends present in the same room. I hope we can use our devices to be closer to each other. But I also hope we can sometimes turn it all off and look up at the sky in wonder.