Pandora’s Box
The World Wide Web is a wonder of human engineering. Never before in our shared history have we been able to communicate at the level we can right now. In a matter of seconds, I can chat with someone in England, South Africa, or China. Not only through the written word but I can hear their voice and likely see their face as well. It is something that sci-fi novelists dreamed of only decades ago. But it doesn’t stop there.
Combined with social media, I can peruse any thought a person might want to express. I can see photos of their children, know who they are dating, where they live. The amount of information is endless. People of disparate minority groups and social outcasts can connect to each other. Are you a fan of New Darren on Bewitched and prefer him to the old one? Here’s a message board for you. It’s allowed humanity to connect with each other.
But to quote the great Ian Malcolm, “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.”
Evolution takes many forms. There’s a common misconception that evolution works in a linear way; that all species are running a race, striving towards some nebulous finish line of perfection. That’s not remotely how it works. Simply put, evolution allows for whatever species is best suited for the conditions it exists in to thrive. That’s it. Humans are naturally narcissistic so we tend to think of ourselves as the peak of evolution. But the reality is that we’ve been around as a species for the blink of an eye. Some animals haven’t seen their DNA change significantly for millions of years.
One of the key adaptations human beings developed was an advanced technique of communication: language. Lots of other animals communicate with each other. Meerkats, groundhogs, prairie dogs, and many other prey species have specific warning signs to alert the rest of the pack if an eagle is nearby or a snake is creeping towards their den. But this is no more advanced communication than a fire alarm going off. It is not language.
Let’s take a step back to primitive man and examine why humans might have started communicating with language in the first place. As noted in the video above, it allowed us to share complex thoughts with each other. Not only could we tell the rest of the tribe “hey, there’s buffalo over there. You go that way and we’ll go this way” but we could begin to create a history, an oral history of tradition that was passed along. This might not have been a major contributing factor in how we survived but I am sure being able to tell generations of children “don’t go near those bushes” might have saved lives.
Now we live in an age where our communication is so complex, so multilayered, that it may have raced beyond our brain’s ability to understand and process it. Let’s examine some of the barriers that would have prevented us from the kind of far-reaching mass communication we have today.
Geography is a major factor. Until we created the technology to send messages to people we could not see, we had to communicate face-to-face. That meant looking at your audience. Chances were if you were that close to a person you knew them. They were part of your family, your tribe, or some neighboring group of humans. That allowed for maybe hundreds of communications at most.
That is until technology evolved. We began writing things down. These documents became time machines, allowing voices from the past to speak in the present. It allowed us to send information into the future as well. We could write something down and send it off to far-flung recipients, known and unknown. As long as you had the magic decoder ring to interpret the symbols, you could take in that information and share it. This allowed for thousands of communications, maybe more if you consider the passage of time.
In 1440 in Germany, Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press. With its movable type, we were able to produce identical volumes of the same information. By the 1500s, we’d produced nearly 20 million books and other written materials. A hundred years later that number soared to over 200 million. As printing technology grew and became more efficient, it became more affordable for people to spread information. This allowed for hundreds of thousands of communications.
But there was still a problem with this process. It wasn’t until public education that the masses became literate. Sure, many working-class folks could read and write to some degree, but it was generally confined to what impacted their lives most: what bread cost, how to run a machine, etc. In 1852, Massachusetts became the first state to make education compulsory, meaning kids had to go. This led to an explosion of literacy and humans were finally able to read and disseminate information en masse. This allowed for potentially millions of communications.
The telephone has a checkered history of invention so let’s just stick with 1876 as the date when the modern telephone is invented by Alexander Graham Bell. Telegraphs had existed before this but they were limited in how they could be accessed by the masses. You had to go to a station to send one. With the telephone, once the infrastructure was in place, people had them in their homes. This allowed for person-person long-distance communication without the need for a mediator (ex: a printer, a telegraph operator).
Little did we know that as we laid down millions upon millions of wires across the world that they would one day be used to connect billions of people in complex communication. In only a few hundred years, human beings leapt from mostly in-person language to relying upon remote methods of sharing language. Whether it was books, newspapers, phone calls, or later radio and television, human beings accelerated beyond their capabilities to process the information. What I mean is that there is far more information available to people now than they could ever hope to consume in a lifetime. This leads to information overload.
Some quick facts about where the internet stands today:
There are nearly 5 BILLION people using the internet today. That number is double what it was in 2013.
In a single year, Google has about 2 TRILLION searches performed. That’s just one search engine.
People create, on average about 2.5 quintillion bytes of information per day. Here’s what that number looks like written out: 2,500,000,000,000,000,000. That’s a LOT of data. It averages out to 1.7MB per second.
The whole of the internet is estimated to be at over 44 zettabytes, which is an insanely big number. That’s 4.4e+13 gigabytes.
There are roughly 1.2 BILLION websites on the internet.
That’s a lot of information! Being generous, let’s say the internet started in 1960. In 60 years, we amassed incredible amounts of information and data to process. And if we’re honest about it, most of that growth has been in the last 30 years. That’s barely a generation or two. There is no way for evolution to keep up with that pace. Are our brains built to handle all this?
For every Doctor Who fan page, there’s a page that spews disinformation and hate. For every social media feed that shares baby photos, there’s one that convinces people to shoot up pizza joints because they’re the hub of a pedophile ring. We’ve reached a point where there is so much information available to us, we can cultivate a walled garden of knowledge that speaks to what we believe. This is incredibly dangerous.
As we’ve seen over the past decade, white supremacy is on the rise. White nationalists remain the biggest domestic terrorism threat. And in a virtual world where you insulate yourself from any outside opinions, that all makes sense. If every day I go onto the internet I see nothing but things that reinforce the views I already have, I will become more anchored to those ideas. Q-Anon is probably the best and most recent of this kind of phenomenon.
Now, obviously in the video above the producers probably picked the more extreme examples of QAnon believers. And as you can see, they don’t even agree on what this conspiracy theory is. And as funny as all this is, it has real-world consequences. There are several members of congress that follow and believe in this stuff. It creates a dangerous situation for people susceptible to disinformation and conspiracy theories. Imagine if all your friends say something, then elected members of the government (including the president) echo those same things. You’d be crazy to NOT believe them. Any opposing opinion or information would seem like FAKE NEWS. And that’s how you end up with nearly a quarter of our fellow citizens believing in this nonsense.
Conspiracy theories have been around for hundreds of years. The first time the term was used (as far as we can tell) in print was in 1870. But surely the masses believed in all sorts of crazy things beforehand. The difference is that now the information can be spread much, much faster and reach billions of people. Are you starting to see the problem? It’s a three-legged dog of disaster. Human beings have brains engineered to seek out new information. We also now have access to more information than ever before. And we can now prune and shape the information we get to only reinforce what we already believe. Seems bad!
I have written before about social media and how we can begin to fix it. In the weeks that followed that post, Facebook, in particular, garnered a lot of criticism. This is because a company whistleblower leaked tons of documents in what is becoming known as the “Facebook Papers”. The company knew that its product was harmful. They also admit they could have done more about it. They didn’t. Ignore the Official Facebook Bullshit Spin in the video below. They aren’t any better than tobacco companies who knew cigarettes were killing people and lied about it and then once they were caught introduced “safer” light cigarettes. It’s all bad.
This isn’t about one company or one form of communication. It is about what our biology can do to help us keep up with the technology we create. We’ve opened Pandora’s Box when it comes to being able to connect with each other. Without proper regulation and limiting exposure to harmful materials, we could be in for a bumpy ride.
In Jurassic Park, were the scientists brilliant for bringing back the dinosaurs? Sure. But they failed to realize they were in the park as well, tweeting out messages from the toilet. Will the T-Rex get us? Time will tell.
