The Great Geek Manual

Books and formal papers make knowledge look finite, knowable. By embracing the unfinished, unfinishable forms of the web we are truer to the spirit of enquiry – and to the world we live in.

Knowledge is fast reshaping itself around its new, networked medium – thereby becoming closer to what it truly was all along.

The internet has decisively moved us from belief in a knowledge of universal essences because it has made plain two facts: we don’t agree, and we can’t let that stop us.

Even after the question is settled, the knowledge will live not in the final article but in that web of discussion, debate, elucidation and disagreement. It’s messy, but messiness is how you scale knowledge.

Knowledge has inherited many other of the web’s properties. It is now linked across all boundaries, it is unsettled, it never comes fully to rest or agreement, and we can see that it is bigger than any of us could ever traverse.

- “The internet shows the messy truth about knowledge” by David Weinberger, February 15, 2012.
First published by New Scientist.

We have already been transformed via harnessing beyond what we once were. We’re already Human 2.0, not the Human 1.0, or Homo sapiens, that natural selection made us. We Human 2.0’s have, among many powers, three that are central to who we take ourselves to be today: writing, speech, and music. Yet these three capabilities, despite having all the hallmarks of design, were not a result of natural selection, nor were they the result of genetic engineering or cybernetic enhancement to our brains. Instead, these are powers we acquired by virtue of harnessing, or neuronal recycling.

In this transition from Human 1.0 to 2.0, we didn’t directly do the harnessing. Rather, it was an emergent, evolutionary property of our behavior, our nascent culture, that bent and shaped writing to be right for our visual system, speech just so for our auditory system, and music a match for our auditory and evocative mechanisms.

[...] Culture’s trick, I have argued in my research, was to harness by mimicking nature. This “nature-harnessing” was the route by which these three kernels of Human 2.0 made their way into Human 1.0 brains never designed for them.[...]

The point is, most science fiction gets all this wrong. While the future may be radically “futuristic,” with our descendants having breathtaking powers we cannot fathom, it probably won’t be because they evolved into something new, or were genetically modified, or had AI-chip enhancements. Those powerful beings will simply be humans, like you and I. But they’ll have been nature-harnessed in ways we cannot anticipate, the magic latent within each of us used for new, brilliant Human 3.0 capabilities.

- “Humans, Version 3.0” by Mark Changizi, February 23, 2011.
First posted to SeedMagazine.com.

According to inflation, the more than 100 billion galaxies, sparkling throughout space like heavenly diamonds, are nothing but quantum mechanics writ large across the sky. To me, this realization is one of the greatest wonders of the modern scientific age

- According to inflation, the more than 100… by Brian Greene, 2004.

…we tend to think of the information age as something entirely new. In fact, people have been wrestling with information for many centuries. If I was going to say when the information age started, I would probably say the 15th century with the invention of the mechanical clock, which turned time into a measurable flow, and the printing press, which expanded our ability to tap into other kinds of thinking. The information age has been building ever since then. […]

Matthew Crawford’s book is a bit of a surprise in this list, because he doesn’t specifically talk about the Internet. But he does talk in a broad and philosophical way about things which are very important in the information age. That is, the way our technologies and our society increasingly encourage the abstract at the expense of the physical.

Crawford argues that we’re losing our sense of importance of actual physical interaction with the natural world. He says that the richest kind of thinking that’s open to human beings is not thinking that takes place in the mind but thinking that involves both the mind and the body interacting with the world. Whereas when we’re sitting at our computer or looking at our smartphone, we’re in a world of symbols. It seems to me that one of the dangers of the Internet, and the way that the screen mediates all work and other kinds of processing, is that not only are we distancing ourselves from interaction with the world, but we’re beginning to lose sight of the fact that that’s even important.

- Nicholas Carr in “Our compulsive consumption of information” by Alec Ash, March 19, 2012.
First published by Salon.

Some scholars have equated the origin of “civilization” with the origin of writing. Laypeople sometimes take this equation to mean that with writing humanity put aside its barbarous past and started behaving in gentlemanly fashion, sipping tea and remembering to say “please”. And indeed, this may be only a mild caricature of what some nineteenth-century scholars actually meant by the equation: writing equals Greece equals Plato; illiteracy equals barbarism equals Attila the Hun. But, in truth, if you add literacy to Attila the Hun, you don’t get Plato. You get Genghis Khan. During the thirteenth century, he administered what even today is the largest continuous land empire in the history of the world. And he could do so only because he had the requisite means of control: a script that, when carried by his pony express, amounted to the fastest large-scale information-processing technology of his era. One consequence was to give pillaging a scope beyond Attila’s wildest dreams. Information technology, like energy technology or any other technology, can be a tool for good or bad. By itself, it is no guarantor of moral progress or civility.

- Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny by Robert Wright, January 9, 2001.

The internet is a culmination of a much longer-term social trend that goes back to the beginning of mass media. People place less and less value on contemplative thinking and more on practical, utilitarian types of thinking, which are all about getting the right bit of information when you need it and about using it to answer very well-defined question. We are in a long-term process of altering our view of what constitutes the ideal intellectual life: Moving away from the ideal of conceptual thinking, reflection and taking the big picture and moving to this very utilitarian mode of constantly collecting little bits of information, not really ever wanting to back away from the flow. Society and individuals can change, but to me the trend is in the direction of interruption, distraction and shallow thinking. (…) I think we will see an acceleration of existing trends, rather than a shift in a new direction.

- “We Turn Ourselves Into Media Creations” by Nicholas Carr, January 1, 2012.

For the entirety of human history, we have operated on small scales and in relative anonymity. Our words are heard by the few people close to us and most are quickly forgotten. We walk down the street without passers-by knowing our names or history. The internet has started to change that. Our words and actions can easily be shared with billions of people around the globe and archived indefinitely. The details of our lives can be found simply by typing our name into Google. We need to understand the risks of this type of technology so that we can fully gain its benefits. We need protections, both technical and legal, so that a small mistake cannot devastate our lives. We also need education to help us function in a world where privacy is no longer the natural state of being.

- “As Google acts, the question is: have we lost our privacy to the internet?” by Joss Wright and Tom Chatfield, March 3, 2012.
Originally published by The Observer.

The simple fact is that we humans are made from hardware that is just too bandwidth-limited, and too slow, to compete with coming waves of computer technology.”
On the one hand, digitization increases growth and prosperity. On the other, write MIT scholars Brynjolfsson and McAfee, “There is no economic law that says that everyone, or even most people, automatically benefit from technological progress.”

Life in the digital world doesn’t just change our behavior; it also changes how we learn and think. Children are growing up in a world in which the distinctions between real and simulated life, as well as between machines, humans and animals, are starting to disappear, concludes Sherry Turkle, a professor of Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT.

Indeed, the behavior of small children can reveal whether their parents own iPhones and iPads. These are the children who spread their fingers across paper photo albums when they want to enlarge the images or drag their fingers across television screens when they’re bored by a cartoon they’re watching.

According to a recent study by Columbia University psychologist Betsy Sparrow, a person who knows that he or she can readily look up a piece of information online doesn’t remember it as well as someone without Internet access. The study finds that the human brain treats the Internet as an extension of itself, as a kind of external memory. Ideally, this means that trivial knowledge can be stored in this external memory, freeing up brain space for creativity. But, in the worst case, the computer becomes a prosthetic brain.

Computer technologies have been a boon to medicine and of great benefit to human beings. But the advances also illustrate that the divide between man and machine is becoming narrower. Neuro-implants define this boundary because they entail having a machine penetrate into the human body. Although today’s instruments are still relatively crude, brain pacemakers are already being used in patients with depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder. In this way, machines are no longer just intervening in the body’s mechanical functions, but also in its emotional life.

- “Blessing or Curse? Competing Visions of a Computer-Controlled Future” by Markus Dettmer, Hilmar Schmundt and Janko Tietz, March 7, 2012.
Originally posted to Spiegel Online.