Infinite Thread

The thing I'm contemplating at the moment is how the human mind can adapt to the internet, what that mind might look like, and the forms in which it will engage with other minds doing the same thing. Let me first lay out some priors. As I mention elsewhere, a lot of these thoughts stem directly from the work of Naomi Alderman, a human currently offering her mind up on the internet to be engaged with, and with whose mind I am currently engaged. 

• Almost all of the intellectual engagement of thoughtful people on the internet is currently happening via old paradigms that were invented pre-internet. Writing and publishing, for instance. Or the addressing of an audience via broadcasting a voice (i.e. the paradigm of radio), or showing a talking head (i.e. the paradigm of tv). 
• Almost all of the engagement that is, to coin a phase, internet-y, is done with memes. It is easy to engage with other minds at very primitive levels with memes. It is very hard to engage with other minds at complex levels via memes. It might be -- it is probably -- possible. 
• The internet is an information technology like writing or the printing press (this is all Alderman now). The first two of those things caused seismic shifts in human existence. They were messy and violent. It took time for humans to adjust to them. 
• We are 30 years into humanity's widespread adoption of the internet. This technology is very new to us.
• The human mind has not yet adapted to the internet at all. 

And I guess I should qualify that last statement. The thoughtful human mind hasn't adapted to the internet at all. Lots of people have adapted themselves to the internet in ways you might called mindless. I don't need to expand on this statement, I don't think. Everyone knows what I am talking about, it's water we're all swimming in. In my darker moments I fear that there's a generation of human beings who were born more or less with the internet and whose minds are lost.

Let me here call out or name something -- what Isaac Newton referred to as, "standing on the shoulders of giants," and elsewhere is referred to as The Great Conversation. There doesn't seem to be any one name for it, but simply it is the process of human minds engaging with each other through time and space via (mostly) writing. Newton famously read Copernicus and Galileo and, even though he was separated from their minds by physically unbridgeable spacetime, was able to engage his mind with theirs. They wrote their shit down and he read it and did his own writing and human knowledge increased. This process has been, to this point in human history, incredibly painstaking and slow. It has required tremendously thoughtful humans to read and to write thoughtfully. And for the most part, though not always, it has been a tremendous boon to humans. 

The invention of writing was the first enabler of this process; that is, the process by which one human mind could engage with the thoughts of another human mind that wasn't physically present. We've long since lost the sense of what a shattering change this must have been. The invention of the printing press expanded this process in a spectacular manner -- suddenly the writings of humans were available to everyone. And these inventions didn't just alter the reach of engagement, they brought new methods and created new forms as well. There are kinds of thinking that a human can do if and only if they are writing. And kinds of thoughts a human mind can only think if they are reading. 

A question Alderman has asked in her most recent BBC Radio series Human Intelligence is how great historical thinkers did their thinking. It's a form of preamble to what I think is the great question of the internet. How did great historical thinkers engage with other human minds? I am absolutely not the first person to note that we need to dispose of the myth of the lone genius. But the existence of the internet makes the disposal of this myth a matter of urgency. The internet is a technology that allows the human mind to engage with other minds across time and space more or less instantly and on demand. We haven't even begun to understand the consequences of this. And we haven't even begun to imagine its potential.