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.

Some people think culture is a virus that infects our minds and controls us in ways that don’t serve us but serve it; I actually think we’ve tamed it so that it serves us quite exquisitely. We’ve actually evolved to embrace our cultures and allow them a degree of mind control over us in return for the prosperity and protection they give in return.

I argue that we have developed an immune system to deal with nasty ideas, just as we have an immune system to deal with genetically based viruses. Those genetically based viruses can occasionally outpace us, but they haven’t won, because we have this immune system inside us that is evolving in real time. I think it’s reasonable to expect we’ve acquired a kind of cognitive immune system for testing out ideas and asking: are they any good?

We can speak of the fidelity of the transmission of genetic information and that fidelity is far greater than the fidelity of cultural information, but nevertheless the fidelity of transmission of culture should make us stand back in awe.

The remarkable fidelity of cultural transmission tells us something more – that our shared cultural knowledge has played a vital role in promoting our survival and prosperity. If it hadn’t, there would not have been such a pressure for it to evolve into forms that are easy for us to remember and transmit to others.

- “Mark Pagel: culture is central to human success” by Ian Tucker, February 18, 2012.
First published by The Observer.

To us, the Web is a sort of shared external memory. We do not have to remember unnecessary details: dates, sums, formulas, clauses, street names, detailed definitions. It is enough for us to have an abstract, the essence that is needed to process the information and relate it to others. Should we need the details, we can look them up within seconds. Similarly, we do not have to be experts in everything, because we know where to find people who specialise in what we ourselves do not know, and whom we can trust. People who will share their expertise with us not for profit, but because of our shared belief that information exists in motion, that it wants to be free, that we all benefit from the exchange of information.

- “We, the Web Kids” by Piotr Czerski, February 21, 2012.
First published by The Atlantic.

There is nothing better than imagining other worlds … to forget the painful one we live in. At least so I thought then. I hadn’t yet realized that, imagining other worlds, you end up changing this one.

- Baudolino by Umberto Eco, 2001.

Digital analysts predict this will be the first election cycle in which Facebook could become a dominant political force. The social media giant has grown exponentially since the last presidential election, rendering it for the first time a major campaigning tool that has the potential to transform friendship into a political weapon.

Facebook is also being seen as a source of invaluable data on voters. The re-election team, Obama for America, will be inviting its supporters to log on to the campaign website via Facebook, thus allowing the campaign to access their personal data and add it to the central data store – the largest, most detailed and potentially most powerful in the history of political campaigns. If 2008 was all about social media, 2012 is destined to become the “data election”.

- “Obama, Facebook and the power of friendship: the 2012 data election” by Ed Pilkington and Amanda Michel, February 17, 2012.

Moral of the story: the internet makes dumb people dumber and smart people smarter. If you don’t know how to use it, or don’t have the background to ask the right questions, you’ll end up with a head full of nonsense. But if you do know how to use it, it’s an endless wealth of information. Just as globalization and de-unionization have been major drivers of the growth of income inequality over the past few decades, the internet is now a major driver of the growth of cognitive inequality. Caveat emptor.

- “The Internet is a Major Driver of the Growth of Cognitive Inequality” by Kevin Drum, February 17, 2012.

The e-book, by eliminating all variations in the appearance and weight of the material object we hold in our hand and by discouraging anything but our focus on where we are in the sequence of words (the page once read disappears, the page to come has yet to appear) would seem to bring us closer than the paper book to the essence of the literary experience. Certainly it offers a more austere, direct engagement with the words appearing before us and disappearing behind us than the traditional paper book offers, giving no fetishistic gratification as we cover our walls with famous names. It is as if one had been freed from everything extraneous and distracting surrounding the text to focus on the pleasure of the words themselves.

- “E-books Can’t Burn” by Tim Parks, February 15, 2012.

In the worldview of code, the generation of meaning happens in ways that scholars trained in the traditional humanities sometimes find difficult to understand and even more difficult to accept. At the level of binary code, the system can tolerate little if any ambiguity. For any physically embodied system, some noise and, therefore, possible ambiguities are always present. In the case of digital computers, noise enters the system (among other places) in the voltage trail-off errors discussed earlier, but these are rectified into unambiguous signals of one and zero before they enter the bit stream.” As the system builds up levels of programming languages such as compilers, interpreters, scripting languages, and so forth, they develop functionalities that permit increasingly greater ambiguities in the choices permitted or tolerated.

- My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts by N. Katherine Hayles, 2005.