The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is summary

Since the days of the abacus, humans have sought to outsource computation to machines. By the 1670s, German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz dreamt of outsourcing even more. What if, instead of numbers, difficult decisions could be outsourced to “concept-crunching machines” that would weigh all the variables to predict outcomes, and then choose the best one? Such machines could solve conflict and facilitate world peace—and they would leave human beings free to pursue art, science, or civic life. 

But if Twitter wars have proven anything, it is that Leibniz was very optimistic.

If all this discussion of the global, attention-seeking digital economy has you blaming the technology that made it possible, you might want to hang on for just a moment. Because while it is easy to think of the internet as a lifeless tool that endlessly sucks up attention, it is just as easy to think of it as a living system. Or at the very least, the natural product of a living system—us.

Signals are everywhere in nature and don’t need cables for transmission. The birds tweeting above you or those dogs barking in the distance? Signals. An elephant’s stomp sending low rumbles through the earth to its elephant relatives miles away? Another signal. The smell of jasmine, the trails of ants, the vibration of a spider's web—and on and on.

What makes human long distance communication different from plants and animals is that ours requires devices to send signals, and devices to receive and interpret those signals. In this way, telecommunication is a sort of amplification of a signal by means of technology. 

Imagine what information might have been exchanged along the trade routes of the neolithic age— around 60 thousand years ago. What languages, customs or knowledge could be gleaned by traders along the Silk Road, for instance? What kinds of information did they share along with their exotic goods and wares in the marketplace? 

While our devices require manufacturing, energy and resources to create and connect, the nature we see around us just grows that way, right? Well, not quite. 

When conquerors and colonists alike first landed on North American shores, they saw the landscape as savage and untamed. But talk to the people living there, and it was a completely different story. Indigenous peoples in North America had long histories of landscape management—from cutting trees and controlled burning to the spreading of food plants. 

Returning to the opening quote about Facebook’s purpose to  “strengthen our social fabric and bring the world closer together.” While both the metaphors he uses are long established ones, they’re still metaphors: society is not a fabric and telecommunications do not shrink the planet.

So, let’s get a bit philosophical. We might just as well start from another, equally ancient metaphor. While today it is no longer fashionable to think about the world or even the universe as a single, living body, this thought has deep roots in many cultures. The Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius urged his readers to think of the Universe as a single, living being possessed of a single soul. Panpsychist traditions see soul or consciousness in everything—from subatomic particles to the universe itself. The ancient Indian Upanishads describe the world as “woven in water like warp and woof.” But weaving brings us back to Zuckerberg’s quote in an unexpected way.