Hypermesh
Part 2 of 2: As pigs in a blanket, we have historically wrapped our weak, watery bodies into more and more layers of technology to arrive at the Hypermesh currently shrouding our planet in a murderous embrace. The process of humanity folding itself into this colossal cocoon is the monumental story discussed in part one. In this essay, I submit an application of this framework, intended to prevent this Hypermesh from becoming our final resting place. The tomb of humanity.
The Mesh Age is but the latest footstep on the long path of human evolution. The most recent chapter in the ancestral story of Homo sapiens. A slow, gradual process that began two hundred thousand years ago. However, something about this narrative is misleading. Misleading because it gives the impression of a slow, linear process. What is wrong about this narrative is the illusion that the future will be like the past. It blinds us to the possibility that this latest chapter might just be our last. I say this not for the sake of fear mongering or predictions of doom. I am cautiously optimistic about the future. Optimistic because we have developed new tools of late. New tools with the capacity to deal with this crisis. And by tools I mean the thinking tools to understand what is really going on, the social tools to interact and collaborate in a mesh network, and lastly, the physical tools needed to strive without terminally degrading our planet. But this optimism does not blind me to the fact that the future will be very different from the past. Why is that? Simply put, the Mesh Age is qualitatively different from past historical periods.
On the surface, the most salient difference is the profusion and power of tool tech. Because of the modularity of tool tech building blocks, and the ability to recombine them in infinite ways to make new blocks, the last few hundred years have seen a combinatorial explosion of new tools. What has exploded is not just the quantity of these blocks, but also the augmented abilities they confer. This change of magnitude brings about exponential, qualitative changes. The thermonuclear bomb did not just increase the destructive energy of the cannon. Its apocalyptic power and the resulting doctrine of mutually assured destruction changed the very concept of war and the balance of global power forever. The invention of a planetary scale internet was not just a faster method to deliver information. It fundamentally altered the fabric of society and the global economy. Commercial fleets of dragnet boats do not just catch more fish than a bunch of fishermen with hand-made nets. They extract enough biomass from the ocean to make entire ecosystems go extinct. The reach of our explosively augmented powers has already vastly exceeded planetary boundaries. Whereas the majority of people two hundred years ago lived their entire lives within a fifty kilometer radius from their place of birth, we now routinely travel across the globe in a matter of hours. Cataclysmic events used to be geographically limited to a kingdom or region in the past. However, we have successfully upgraded our destructive powers. Welcome to the Anthropocene. Annihilation is now planetary!
The destructive power of our tool tech gets all the limelight, but there is a more subtle — and pivotal — difference. Connectivity. By connectivity I do not mean only the internet. I also include the myriad connections between people, products and their supply chain. I use the term Mesh Age precisely because all constituent parts are interconnected, interdependent, interrelated, and interacting in entirely new ways. The Mesh is I to the power of four, or I⁴. A colossal network of billions of agents with information flowing between nodes at (almost) the speed of light exhibits very different properties than even the most recent historical societies. Change propagates fast, feedback loops create ripple effects across the globe, or trigger sensitive tipping points between meta-stable states. Powerful epiphenomena sweep societies like the storm waves of southern seas. Heretofore separate parts are not governed by rigid relationships of action and reaction any more. In a complex dynamical system, the forces driving change are non-linear feedback, resonance, and entrainment.
For the first time in history, the structural organization of human society has been fundamentally altered. Historical societies had a linear structural organization. That means direct control was exerted through hierarchy, central coordination, and the top-down flow of power. Said power used to be organized around the ability to control and predict. The halo of authority rested on the promise that the future could be ordained. Therefore, authority required a predictable environment. The local environment had to be uniform, probabilistic (gaussian), stable, and somewhat intuitive. All this came to an abrupt end within the mesh. Inside this interconnected structure, linear organizations are challenged by distributed networks. Groups self-organize into de-centralized, collective, bottom-up formations. Connectivity causes unpredictable behavior of power law and scale-free distributions, fat tails, and dynamic change. Fragile states, unintuitive and fleeting. This new environment is central authority’s worst nightmare. Zero-sum competitive arms races are making way for unpredictable fitness landscapes. The control of closed, protected know-how is being challenged by swarm intelligence. Production efficiency increasingly replaced by creativity and imagination. However, this is not the blissful utopia of kumbaya-singing angels. Reality is and always will be messy. We are already witnessing players of questionable character and intent, capturing network effects for the purpose of commercial gain. These network effects are described by Metcalfe’s Law. Metcalfe’s law states that the value of a network is proportional to the square of its number of users. In other words the connectivity of a network increases exponentially with the addition of users. In the Mesh Age, we need to be more vigilant against the capture and use of these effects.
This entirely new structural organization of society is also a formidable challenge to our sense-making abilities. Our grandparents were still somewhat able to inhabit a local perspective to make sense of the world. But within the mesh, the local perspective has lost the ability to convey what is really going on. That is because it is point-focused. It is micro-localized. I call this the first-person shooter fallacy — life inside the Wolfenstein 3D video game. A game played through the eyes of a protagonist running through endless corridors. Always blatantly unaware of what lies behind the pixelated wall. Ignorant of the dangers lurking around the next corner. This perspective limits us to understanding only what is right in front of our eyes. It creates a concentric tunnel-vision making the world appear anthropocentrically scaled. It is the source of what cognitive scientists call hyperbolic discounting. The illusion that anything close to us is more salient. That things in the distance are less important. The existential challenges we face today, the end-level-boss, if you will, are neither local, nor human-scaled. That is why, despite being aware of them, we fail to grasp them. Timothy Morton calls these large phenomena Hyperobjects. Things like evolution, extinction, climate change, or plastic waste are all entities so distributed across time and space, that we cannot directly experience them. At best, we can perceive spacio-temporal fragments of them. Proximate micro-manifestations of something much, much bigger. We don’t experience the global climate for example. We perceive rain, sunshine, a thunderstorm, or a forest fire destroying our home. The myopia of our hyper-local, human-scaled point of view fails to grasp the hyperobjects within the mesh. They cannot be neatly shrink-wrapped, labeled, and categorized. Our micro-perspective fails to comprehend their transfinite nature. To make sense of the Mesh Age, we must move from an egocentric to an allocentric world view. A view in which we capture our relationship with the Mesh. Or as John Vervaeke more poetically put it, we must reach a state in which “the salience of reality is finally capable of eclipsing the narcissistic glow of our ego.”¹
Pace Layers
In part one, I employed the provocative metaphor of the pigs in a blanket for precisely this reason. It highlights an important feature of past and present human civilization. A feature that I believe to be critical to sense-making in the Mesh Age. By carefully separating the mesh into its four constituent layers (biological, psi-tech, social tech, tool tech) we start to glimpse the unique features of each. Each layer exhibits separate behaviors, has different properties, operates at different speeds, and has different enabling & restricting constraints. Of course, like all frameworks, it cannot capture reality perfectly. However, it is a useful way to conceptualize human society from the perspective of an interconnected whole. It is also a powerful way to understand the strains and failure points of the historic transition to the mesh society. Finally, it is a tool to re-evaluate our position within civilization at large and transcend the first-person-shooter fallacy of our forebears. American writer Stewart Brand calls this framework Pace Layering, the self-stabilizing organization of hierarchical levels in a complex system. This organization is called pace layers because each layer operates at different speeds. However, as Brand puts it: “each layer influences and responds to the layers closest to it in a way that makes the whole system resilient.”²
The biological layer
This layer is not just the human body. It is all the biomass on this planet. Human beings are in no way “separate” from their environment. We are rooted, embedded, and made possible by the biological substrate on our planet. We are but a small, endosymbiotic part of organic life, dwelling on a temperate rock, in an arm of our galaxy called the Orion Spur. Although this is the oldest and most fundamental layer within the mesh — the layer all other layers emerged from — its behavior and properties have mystified the greatest of minds. Throughout human history, animal and human life was either said to be possessed by spirits, inspired by muses, inhabited by ancestors, or most recently, imbued with an eternal soul. The brainy Immanuel Kant observed natural growth cycles and promptly threw in the philosophical towel. He deduced there had to be a form of causality still unknown to us. He famously made the absurd declaration that a science of living things was therefore impossible. So what is so confusing about the behavior of the biological layer? Is it the confusing hierarchy of nested parts, interacting with each other willy nilly? Amino acids, proteins, organelles, cells, organs, body parts, and so on. Is it the vexing display of adaptation, inter-level causality, feedback loops, and semi-permeable boundaries? The ability to self-replicate, self-assemble, and self-repair? Probably all of the above. Until very recently, this potpourri of exasperating features presented an impenetrable mystery, best explained by a homunculus inhabiting our mind. Or better yet, as Joseph Campbell put it, by refusing “to admit within ourselves the fullness of that pushing, self-protective, malodorous, carnivorous, lecherous fever that is the very nature of the organic cell.”³
Fortunately, thanks to the work of Alicia Juarrero⁴ and many others, we are beginning to develop the thinking tools needed to understand these processes. They are complex adaptive systems operating like virtual engines. They are dynamic feedback cycles governed by opposing constraints. Self-stabilizing loops driven by adversarial forces. Beyond this scientific understanding, we are also developing the thinking tools to understand our relationship with the bio layer. Since the Severance from “nature” during the Agricultural Age, we have treated the bio layer like the ground we walk on. With utter disdain. Our newfound destructive powers have highlighted how dependent we are on a healthy biological layer. The word “dependent” does not even get close to capturing our relationship with it. That is because humans are an endosymbiotic part of the bio layer. We are the bio layer!
But if the bio layer is the very foundation from which life and the other layers emerge, how on earth were we able to forget our relationship with it? In his book To Have or to Be? psychoanalyst Erich Fromm describes how modern society is made of notoriously unhappy people: lonely, anxious, depressed, destructive, and dependent. According to Fromm this is because we live in a state of modal confusion. Fromm distinguishes between the having-mode and the being-mode. The having-mode is a focus on things, both abstract and physical, that can be owned, consumed, and replaced. The being-mode refers to states of our mind and our relationship with the world — life as the transformative process of becoming. Notice for example the profound difference between “having sex”, and “being in love”. Our modern societies have increasingly replaced being with having. This is apparent even in everyday language where we replace verbs with nouns. We say “I have a problem” when we are worried about something. We say “I have a happy marriage” when we are happily married. We say “I have insomnia” when we are not sleeping well. In Fromm’s view, these are not slips of the tongue. These are expressions of existential modes:
“I refer to two fundamental modes of existence, to two different kinds of orientation toward self and the world, to two different kinds of character structure the respective predominance of which determines the totality of a person’s thinking, feeling, and acting. In the having mode of existence my relationship to the world is one of possessing and owning, one in which I want to make everybody and everything, including myself, my property.”⁵
Our modal confusion makes super-salient to us the things we can possess. But it does so at the expense of our being. Our being part of the bio layer. Our process of becoming, in a continuous process of transformation that makes us human. Modal confusion leads us to solve all problems with things. It creates a kind of techno-myopia. An undue focus on tool power, in the vainglorious hope that future problems might be solved by yet another Haber-Bosch Process, yet another penicillin discovery, or the long awaited viable nuclear fusion. This is not the argument of a luddite. I favor continuous technological progress for the betterment of life. But pace layering shows that all four layers need to co-exist in balance. The focus on things should not make us disdain that which we are. The allure of gain and power must be balanced, lest it become a ghastly enchantment. Our love of life must overcome our love of death.
The psychotechnology layer
In the public discourse about technology, this layer is most frequently overlooked. This is all the more puzzling, because just like screwdrivers, nanobots, and aircraft carriers, psi-tech is a collection of man-made tools augmenting our powers. Presumably, this kind of tech is easily neglected because it cannot be seen. In the terminology of Daniel Dennett, thinking tools are the wetware installed on our neck-tops. Because psi-tech lacks the salience of physical tools, we ought to remind ourselves that it is the one technology that under-lies all other technologies. It is the sub-stance all technology is made of. All historical transitions we reviewed in part one, shamanic, agricultural, and axial were ushered in by a qualitative leap in psi-tech. The Mesh Age is no exception. Our tool technology was made possible by Newton’s laws of motion, Cardano’s algebra, Kepler’s laws of planetary motion, Darwin’s theory of evolution, Boltzmann’s statistical mechanics, Einstein’s General Relativity, Shannon’s information theory, and many others. However, the thinking tool most urgently needed of late is conspicuously absent. The skill to survive inside the Hypermesh. This sorry state of affairs has an unfortunate consequence. We are becoming more stupid. Stupid, not in the sense of being dumb, or lacking knowledge. Oh no. We are figuratively drowning in knowledge! In an essay on why smart people can be so very stupid, Sacha Golob describes it thus:
“Stupidity is a very specific cognitive failing. Crudely put, it occurs when you don’t have the right conceptual tools for the job. The result is an inability to make sense of what is happening and a resulting tendency to force phenomena into crude, distorting pigeonholes.”⁶
Golob uses the example of British high command during the First World War. He describes how Field Marshal Douglas Haig applied traditional cavalry tactics to trench warfare. It failed not because of a mistake. It failed because Haig employed obsolete concepts. The thinking tools he applied did not fit the task at hand. This is the definition of stupidity. Trying to solve a problem using the wrong intellectual means. Interestingly, educated people are more prone to this kind of failure. And in my view, as a species entering the Mesh Age, we are increasingly stupid. Our science is stupefied by the ghost of direct cause and effect. Universal laws predicting a clock-like cosmos. A death cult of determinism and deduction. Our ontology is hypnotized by the master-slave relationship of patriarchy, racism, and the severance of the human from “nature”. Our education is captivated by the sausage factories called schools. The mass-production of uniform, industrial human commodities for consumption by the labor market. Our academia is consumed by the acquisition of merit. An ephemeral quality bestowed upon captive servants by elite gatekeepers in gilted gowns.
The Mesh Age requires us to develop new thinking tools. The psi-tech to understand the development and impact of large, slow entities like hyperobjects. But also the dynamics of fast-moving network effects, like entrainment, synchrony, resonance, and meta-stable states. As a whole we need society to become more fluid, and less monolithic. Instead of building static systems that are stable yet fragile, we have yet to learn how to build dynamic systems that are robust, resilient, or better yet, antifragile. We need to learn how to use constraints and circuit breakers, enabling global connectivity that remains locally robust. To survive the Mesh Age, we need to adapt to a more fluid, uncertain environment. We need to guard against meme-complexes with parasitic effects on thinking tools. Against delusions of mass-psychosis, conjured by weaponized persuasion machines driven by profit. We must avoid attempts to perpetrate menticide against the collective agency of open societies. Norbert Wiener, godfather of cybernetics, understood that the interaction with a network of machines would require us to overcome our stupidity. In 1964 he wrote these prophetic lines in his book God & Golem, Inc.:
“The future offers very little hope for those who expect that our new mechanical slaves will offer us a world in which we may rest from thinking. Help us they may, but at the cost of supreme demands upon our honesty and our intelligence.”⁷
The social technology layer
Sometimes called social operating system, this layer has but one function: to structure and coordinate the behavior of large groups. This is behavioral modification at scale, but not necessarily with a nefarious goal. Behavior is modified to form a coherent society with shared purpose and identity. It is a force counteracting the natural impulse to disband, dissipate, and disperse. This function is achieved by a combination of tools. So-tech provides a mythology that grounds individuals in a relationship with the cosmos. Myth builds a shared foundation on which to build individual narrative identities. The story we tell ourselves about who we are, through relevant connections with the world, society, and ourselves. Culture is also so-tech. It binds us together by a shared sense of origin, beliefs, norms, and customs. Other social operating functions are more mundane, but just as crucial. There are so-tech tools that deal with making (legislative), communicating (media), and enforcing (executive) decisions. So-tech deals with conflict resolution (judiciary), the division of labor (labor market), as well as storage and exchange of value (economy).
Even this flimsiest of outlines sketched above makes the current fracture lines in this layer glaringly apparent. The institutions administering these so-tech functions exhibit signs of advanced ossification. Dusty sanctuaries of long lost glory, crumbling under the hammer blows of society’s meshification. The control monopoly of central banks on the means of value storage and exchange has already been destroyed. Institutional patriarchies guarding male privileges of hierarchical power from East to West are retreating from a tide of scrutiny and distributed power networks. The division of labor is ebbing away from traditional forms of nine-to-five employment, and into the attention and gig economies. Decision-making systems based on parliamentary democracies are increasingly prone to polarization and the splintering of grass-roots support into vital communities of shared concerns. In The Revolt of the Public, Martin Gurri offers an astute explanation. He observes that scarcity made information appear authoritative. When the amount of information increased, any one source appeared less so. As we drown in an information tsunami, signal turns to noise, and claims of authority are eroded. In his own words:
“Uncertainty is an acid, corrosive to authority. Once the monopoly on information is lost, so too is our trust. [ ] When proof for and against approaches infinity, a cloud of suspicion about cherry-picking data will hang over every authoritative judgment.”⁸
Just as the full force of the information tsunami is blasting away our trust in information, another force is eroding social cohesion. As I mentioned above, so-tech relies on traditional forms of mass behavioral manipulation. But traditional forms of social coordination are increasingly losing ground to weapons of mass persuasion. Micro-targeted attention capture through algorithmic curation should make us distrust even our own decisions. Daniel Schmachtenberger et al argue the following:
“The histories of propaganda [ ] demonstrate that knowledge about large-scale mind control has simply been waiting on technologies powerful enough for full deployment. Examples from contemporary propaganda make clear that, by legal definitions, many individuals’ ideas and choices are no longer their own. Instead, they have been adopted as a part of their identity under conditions of undue influence.”⁹
Undue influence is a legal term describing coercive forces of mind control and brainwashing. The authors argue that the behavioral entrainment exerted by social media is now stronger than the ideals and laws of the nation. Information technologies have made collective decision-making impossible by destroying the epistemic commons and lowering the entry-barrier for propaganda at scale. Nudge units micro-influence us through sensory overload and the hypnotic trance of infinite doom-scrolling. As I have argued above, there is nothing new about the behavioral manipulation of so-tech. What is concerning is the ability of digital technology to micro-target our attention at scale. Yet, it is here, that we find a ray of light. An escape from the shackles of this platonic cave. That is because by understanding how these systems work, we also learn how to disable them. For-profit behavioral entrainment captures our attention and nudges our limbic system through raw emotional stimuli. This system is vulnerable to a simple counter measure.
The social tech of mass behavioral manipulation has always been under the sovereign control of the state. If a society is to retain cohesion, purpose and identity, this has to remain so. Non-state actors can be prevented from using mass behavioral manipulation, especially for profit-seeking purposes. On the collective level, social technology can de-couple algorithmic nudging and coercive communication from financial incentives and profit taking. The scraping and monetizing of behavioral patterns and personal information for financial gain has to become illegal. Such regulation is neither science fiction, nor the overreach of a totalitarian state. It simply determines personal digital data to be confidential, like personal medical records. Only fiduciary institutions should be allowed to access them. This is easily achieved by strict data protection laws. By preventing non-state actors from harvesting personal information at scale and tracking citizens online. Without the collection of personal information and the ability to snoop on netizen’s online movements, behavioral manipulation is impossible.
But we can do more. It is entirely possible to employ powerful algorithmic curation for the benefit of society. Information technology could be employed as a powerful educational tool. Massively Multiplayer Online games could be used as powerful distributed sensor networks. Collective decision-making could be re-imagined as a liquid online democracy. A dynamic network of citizens exercising their vote directly or through distributed meta-delegation. All government-funded contracts could easily be made available on distributed blockchain ledgers for public oversight. All recipients of government funds could also be mandated to publish their accounts on that blockchain. Algorithmic persuasion could become nudging for good, an incentive for positive-sum collective interaction. But of course, the legacy system we are saddled with will not easily yield power. Incumbent power structures will protect their privileges with force if needed. But we have the words of Thomas Paine to inspire us: “Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered. Yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.”¹⁰
The tool technology layer
As I have argued in part one, tool-tech captures physical phenomena to fulfill specific functions. This is Brian Arthur’s definition of technology as constantly evolving toolkit. Modular building blocks with a Lego-like ability for endless recombination into further compound blocks. Tool-tech devices are mechanical, optical, sonic, chemical, quantum-physical, pharmaceutical, biological, electrical, and of course, digital. However, all tool-tech shares one purpose. Power augmentation. It bestows enhanced abilities on the proprietor. The owner of the most advanced tool-tech holds a competitive advantage. This dual property — modularity and power augmentation — reveals, both, the true potential of tool-tech and it’s risk to the pace layered mesh.
The modular nature of tool-tech explains the recent combinatorial explosion of available building blocks and applications. We have seen exponential growth in number, variety, and availability of tool-tech, but also in its reach and power. The speed of this explosion has long surpassed our ability to manage, let alone control its applications. The terraforming power of our myriad tools are creating a tragedy of the commons of planetary scale. Tool-tech’s almost magical ability to confer competitive power to those who wield it has mired the world in never-ending arms races at the enterprise and national level. These arms races have fed the dynamics of economies addicted to eternal growth. Parasitic, self-reinforcing cycles of resource extraction, value creation, value destruction, rinse and repeat. Progress framed as the invention of ever more tool-tech. Tool-tech is causing a major imbalance with the other layers. The destruction of the bio-layer is the most apparent, urgent, and worrisome. In our conquest of that externalized entity we call “nature”, it is not only our environment that has changed. We have transformed ourselves into machine-people. I quote Erich Fromm once again:
“Industrial society has contempt for nature — as well as for all things not machine-made and for all people who are not machine makers […]. People are attracted today to the mechanical, the powerful machine, the lifeless, and ever increasingly to destruction.”¹¹
The hyper-mesh is also making our psi-tech obsolete. Many of our thinking tools are no longer fit for the job of making sense of the world. Ideas based on local, static, hierarchical, patriarchal, and egocentric world views are already causing a stupidity epidemic in a world dominated by planetary, dynamic, self-organizing effects of resonance and entrainment. Our response should neither be a luddite techno-phobia reflex, nor the establishment of eco-fascism or intellectual tyranny. The key lies in balancing the four layers of the mesh with each other to create a harmonious whole. Each of them an essential protagonist in a sensational play called Homo sapiens, staged on the breathtaking scene of planet earth. For this play to continue, the protagonists must engage in a balanced choreography of musical harmony. None of the dancers must be allowed to suffocate the others, lest this drama prematurely ends in tragedy. For this play to continue as an infinite game, we must recognize the main players (pace layers), and counteract forces in either layer that are detrimental to the system. All forces that deteriorate the bio-layer faster than it can regenerate, effects that cripple our thinking tools and damage our abilities for sense-making, behavioral manipulation that erodes the social technologies we need for collective interaction and cultural identities. We must become aware of the mesmerizing glow of power augmentation, not to renounce it altogether, but to regain our agency. These words are an incantation to ward off mass psychosis. A prayer to protect us from turning into prophets of radical hedonism. Ego-crazed apostles of doom, drunk on ecstatic visions of an imaginary world, while actively destroying the real one.
To avoid this fate we must balance the pace layers of the mesh. But we need something more. In the mesh, we must partially renounce our need to predict and control. Our need to command outcomes will increasingly be frustrated. Our desire to administer the future will increasingly fail to achieve anything at all. This is the topic of the next essay. For now, I leave you with the prescient words of Erich Fromm who captures the spirit of this idea concisely:
“The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.”¹²
Footnotes:
1 John Vervaeke. Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. E. 11. 19:45 min. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39NpjQDtqNw
2 https://jods.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/issue3-brand/release/2
3 Campbell, Joseph. The hero with a thousand faces. Novato, California: New World Library, 2008. Print.
4 Alicia Juarrero. Dynamics in Action: Intentional Behavior as a Complex System. EMERGENCE, 2(2), 24–57. Copyright © 2000, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
5 Fromm, Erich. To have or to be. New York: Harper & Row, 1976. Print.
7 Norbert Wiener, “God & Golem, Inc.: A Comment on Certain Points Where Cybernetics Impinges on Religion” 1964. MIT Press.
8 Gurri, Martin. The Revolt of the Public: And the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium. Stripe Press, 2018
9 https://consilienceproject.org/social-media-enables-undue-influence/
10 Thomas Paine, The American Crisis
11 Fromm, Erich. To have or to be. New York: Harper & Row, 1976. Print.
12 Ibid.
