For years revolutionary yay-sayers have piped that the internet will change everything. For precisely as long I’ve responded with scorn, feeling justified by my observation that part of being human is a bias toward thinking your own lot as ever so slightly above average. You can see this phenomenon every day. Just ask a smoker about the risks of getting cancer from smoking and he’ll give you one set of figures. Ask him then whether he honestly thinks those figures apply to him and he’ll coolly explain why he’ll beats those stats. We overestimate our lot; labeling the age we live through as revolutionary is just another symptom of that miracle of “I”. I ignored the cries of revolution and put on another bowl of pasta.
I’ve changed my mind. We are perched on the apex of a revolution – I cannot conclude otherwise. Fearing that the optimistic bias has defeated me too, my goal today is to attempt to prove this hypothesis. I’ll start with my “idea collision” theory, one tenet of my model for the creation of novel knowledge in a society :
“The probability of the formation of new knowledge is directly proportional to the number of collisions between ideas multiplied by the distance between the two colliding ideas.”
What happens when ideas collide
New ideas occur when two previously existent ideas collide for the first time. Combine the old fashioned telephone with battery technology and wireless signaling and you get the mobile phone. Combine the physics of mass, energy and electromagnetism signals and, with a lot of thought, and a stroke of genius, you get relativity. Don’t be fooled into thinking that every collision creates valuable new knowledge. The vast majority of collisions are fruitless and their results must be discarded.
Filtering out the many bad combinations from the few good ones requires testing. Here you have two choices – carry out experiments in the physical world or carry them out in your head using your own internal model of the world to test hypotheses. Carrying out experiments in the world is safer since the real world results provides feedback showing you if you are wrong or right. Carrying out experiments in your head is more efficient and sometimes necessary, given limitations of real world experimentation (such as unavailability of resources, data or time). It was through a vast network of mental experiments that Einstein discovered relativity – he imagined himself as a photon of light observing how things moved around him, eventually arriving at a theory he proved later with mathematics. Be warned, however, to carry out mental experiments you need to have a seriously accurate mental model of your domain of experimentation.
Einstein: the daddy himself
Digressions aside, every Eureka moment eventuating int the formation starts with a collision - followed then by testing. Thus more collisions are better than less for the generation of new ideas.
Moving on to the second part of his hypothesis – the multiplication of theses collisions by the “distance” between the colliding ideas. Lets start by defining distance: if ideas are “close” together this means that they are frequently thought of together by others, meaning the collisions have already occurred and most of the knowledge has already been harvested. Here, we approach a saturation point, whereby collisions no longer results in the generation of new knowledge. Contrast this with when ideas are “distant”. In this case the colliding ideas have seldom, if ever, been thought of together. It during these collisions that the most powerful new ideas are generated. Take the double helix structure of DNA, which was discovered by Crick and Watson. In their research the pair immersed themselves deeply in genetics, biochemistry, chemistry, physical chemistry, and X-ray crystallography. You might say there is little “distance” between the fields, as all are sciences - but remember that distance here is defined as the frequency with which two ideas are thought of together. Very few minds have the drive or ability to simultaneously understand so many complex scientific fields fields and so the intersection of ideas explored by Crick and Watson was at zero saturation, a field ripe for the harvest of fresh knowledge.
Crick and Watson discovered the double helix structure of these jeans
Returning to the title of this post – how is it that internet changes everything? Because it vastly increased the number of collisions occurring between ideas and the distance between the colliding ideas, in exactly the same way that urbanization did (the only comparable revolution in the past, the consequences of which were the industrial revolution).
Before mass urbanization people lived together in small communes, most staying put for the majority of their lives. These rural settlers had low numbers of idea collisions in their lives, given the small number of members in the community (and the time taken to travel to one another) and the small number of non human idea carriers (e.g. books, work practices, etc. – the medium through which an idea collides is irrelevant – what counts is that in someone’s brain the two somehow meet). The infrequent collisions during the agrarian age rarely generated new knowledge since the distance between the colliding ideas was miniscule as most members of the community had spent their entire lives together, preoccupied with the same narrow domains.
Contrast this to the industrial age. Settlers moved from across the countryside to big cities and instead of bumping into five or ten people in a day (and similarly low numbers of other “idea transmitters”), a person might now bump into ten to one hundred times more people or idea transmitters. As these people often came from different villages and different backgrounds the set of ideas they each held differed significantly and so the distance metric increased too.
We still live in cities – and cities today are bigger than before, better connected, and draw people from a broader background that in the industrial age. These factors increase both the number of collisions which occur and the distance metric for these colliding ideas. Distance is also increased too by improvements in the standard of living which enables many in the developed world to devote themselves deeply to the world of ideas. That being said, these improvements do not have the same revolutionary quality as the move from rural to agricultural. I
Now we have the world wide web, where people’s ideas collide with an exponentially greater frequency with ideas of exponentially greater distance. Your Facebook profile puts you in touch with hundreds through it’s mini feed. An individual wiki article may have thirty or forty editors, and by reading through the page you are exposed to the sum of their collisions (remember too that each of their inputs may itself draw on a similarly huge array of past bombardments). There are a lot more collisions – things are heating up.
Idea Collisions on the Wa-Wa-Wee-Wa scale
Not only are there exponentially more collisions – but also these collisions are from disparate fields. With the web an American can communicate effortlessly with other English speakers across the world. The spread of English as a new latin means that other previous boundaries separating distant ideas are now crumbling. Powerful tools like Google Translate provide a Rosetta Stone across language barriers. The rise of links between information on the internet and the Google powered search engine makes delving into distant ideas effortless – the barriers to learning distant fields are dropping harder than a banging London beat.
We are living on the slope of a steeply rising knowledge curve – and it has not been since the rise of urbanization has this slope been so steep. This, I argue, is why we are living in the age of a revolution.
Think otherwise? Agree? Say so in the comments.
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