Too much Monkey Business
For those of you unfamiliar with the idea, the infopocalypse is about the complete collapse of the boundary between information and noise to the point that people generally become gibbering idiots. Yes, I know it sounds nutty, and some elements are, but give me 20 minutes to explain. I’m sure nothing radically new will happen to Meghan Fox, Jon and Kate Plus Eight or Sarah Palin. Michael Jackson will be just as dead now that his memorial is over. 20 minutes is all I’m asking for. Oh wait, Sarah Palin said what now?
Infopocalypse was first described to me by various occultists I knew in the early 1980s. Then it was called Information Overload, and yes, that was when cell phones were carried in briefcase-size containers, when the war between beta and vcr was hot, when we operated our computers using DOS commands (C:/), when the SONY Walkman was the latest in miniaturized music delivery, when most of us had just replaced vinyl with cassettes, before there was a world wide web.
We did have a number of new-fangled gadgets, yes siree Bob we did. We had large, slow personal computers. We had the CB radio, which enabled us to speak to people we hadn’t even met in real time in our cars or trucks. In academia, the Xerox machine had just replaced the mimeograph, although many of us continued kickin’ (or in this case crankin’) it old school as long as we could. Some of us had invested a lot of hours typing stencils, and anyway this Xerox thing was a gimmick. Every literate person still owned a manual typewriter, (mine, I’m proud to say, was from the 1920s), although at work we had expensive e-lectric IBMs, some that could hold an entire page of text in preview before it printed. That saved us a lot of white-out. If you went to the library, they had this new-jack research tool called the microfiche, which compressed scores of pages onto transparencies, so you didn’t have to get up every ten minutes to request another folder. You could even print stuff for ten cents a page and take it home.
You get the picture. Stone knives and bearskins, as Mr. Spock described it. But even then, the more spiritually enlightened I knew were saying that electronics had embarked us on a perilous journey. Anthroposophist and Findhorn people derided the television (in 1980 we got HBO) as Ahriman’s playground, and some of my teachers refused to even own a television, much less a betamax.
They worried about information overload, too much information, not enough knowledge.
They said to consider that between Roman times and the Renaissance, the total amount of information in the world available to intelligent people doubled once. If you were a smart person in that time period, you read in Latin, so you could read everything out there pretty easily. Of course, you’d have to walk to wherever the document in question was unless you were rich enough to pay a monk to make you a copy. It was probably ten cents a page, but that was a lot of money in those days.
Jews, who got approximately equal amounts of shit from Muslims and Christians, made a nice living in the late Medieval, early Renaissance period serving as a bridge between Latin and Arabic, translating texts and facilitating the process of consolidating the information that had been available to the Roman world before Christians went nuts and burned the library at Alexandria. The sack of Constantinople by Christians early in the Crusades and its destruction by Muslims in the 15th Century ironically completed the process of restoring a partial canon of classical knowledge. Yet, restoring what had been known wasn’t a net gain to information as a whole, just to certain individuals, and even then, even the most intelligent people only took away as much information as they could remember, until the Printing Press changed the game shortly after as decisively as the PC would in our time.
When printing began in the 16th C, you read Dominican critiques of Guttenberg where they lament that books would be the death of memory. They were right, but so what? The emphasis shifted from the quality of your memory to the quality of your library. If I remember what book I found a fact in, that is just as good. I can reread a passage. I don’t have to recite it. This was the immense value of the British Museum Library, now fobbed off to Paddington as a curiosity, the Astor Free Library which became the NYPL. For the first time, any mook with a library card had access to unparalleled riches.
Everyone who comes into our apartment says, “God, you have a lot of books,” but Wendy and I possess a fraction of what had been our entire collections. We no longer have the space. We accept that the lost parts of our collection are lost parts of our brains which we threw or gave away. The only thing Columbia students use the Butler Library for these days is making sex videos in the vacant stacks.
I sent a bunch of books recently to my friend Kellen out in Chicagoland. He’s only 11, but he is cool like that, and I know he will read them, and I know therefore that the information contained in those books will not die with me, and that is the point. I’ll send more. Kellen can unpack NFL first round picks for the last ten years. You want Ted Williams’ lifetime stats? Kellen’s got them and lots more. He has a phenomenal memory and thinks about the world in a nuanced way. He is a throwback in this digital age. Yet, for all his gifts, he doesn’t have an integrated, vertically organized data base. He possesses facts but no theories. But he’s 11, so WTF (I like the Army version of this, Wilco Tango Foxtrot). If I can, I’ll continue to give him books to help him create theories, because without theories, facts just float around in your brain like oyster crackers.
And yet, every day, the modern world opens up our heads and pours a generous helping of new crackers in there. I am like Kellen in the sense that I admit a certain fascination with trivia. Today I was contemplating the decline of Nomar’s stats since he was exiled as a meditation on Man’s fate and the fickle nature of public attention, and yes, the fact that Jeter totally kicks Nomar’s ass now and forever. But it used to be that you’d have to comb newspapers for such information or look through almanacs or Bill James. It used to be hard to find data.
Information becomes the heat in the engine of time which drives us like wax in a lava lamp. Early on, the system resists change, but as it heats up, it becomes more dynamic, farther from equilibrium. In other words, the bits get smaller and move a lot faster. Maybe HaShem is driving us in a direction of perfection, or maybe He is beguiled by the pattern. Or maybe this is just another rise and fall.
One way to think about the period from 1500 to 1800 is that it represents the fragmentation of knowledge. Secular learning replaced sacred learning for most people. Hoi Polloi contended with elites for the privilege of opinion. Literacy became the key to social mobility. Galileo was the first important scientific thinker to write in a vulgar language. He died the same year that Newton, the last important scientific thinker to write in Latin, was born.
Alexander von Humbolt (1769-1859) was the final Encyclopedic Mind, one person who had read every scientific paper available to Europe, the last master of every scientific field. He also established meteorology as a discipline and created biogeography.
On the other side, there is Diderot, Voltaire and others, who decided to collect and distribute texts to as many people as possible. As a result, the global data base increased year by year. This was democracy at work, which they believed led to the inevitable triumph of common folks.
Information was the privilege of the few in 1000 AD. Maybe a few thousand people heard Mozart perform in his lifetime. Today, information is promiscuous. In the West at least, it’s available to anyone who wants it, as much as they want whenever they want it. What fascinates me about contemporary China and Iran is that their struggles are against information itself. Lenny Bruce said memorably in the 60s that “Information keeps the people free. A knowledge of Syphilis is not instruction to get Syphilis.” He lost his battle against censorship, but he won the war, at least in the West. Today our little plastic boxes contain billions of pages of information, more than all the libraries in history.
But what is information? More importantly, what is knowledge? I can’t tell you my cell number. I have it written down on a card in my wallet. I’ve managed to remember Wendy’s cell through sheer repetition, but if anything happens to her, I’m a dead man, because hers is the only number I know. I keep a sheet with all of my various internet passwords on my desk because without the list, I’m fucked.
Information can be stuff necessary in order to function in practical terms. It can also be junk. I’ve had 15 different phone numbers in my life. At one point each one was valuable, but remembering them all would simply be noise in my brain. Now my phones remember their own numbers. I’m out of the loop until I drop my phone into a pond. Junk information is stuff like the name of Michael Jackson’s dermatologist, absolutely anything having to do with American Idol, the Bachelorette and especially Jennifer Anniston who needs to exiled to Antarctica right now. That is noise. The more you get those crackers in your head, the closer you get to screaming, “Shut up, and let me think!”
The seminal essay on the modern breakdown of knowledge is found in Science Since Babylon by Arthur de Solla Price (1975). There are 32 copies left on amazon.com, so order now. Use your VISA or Mastercard and we’ll also throw in Everything is Under Control by Robert Anton Wilson (1998). There are 16 copies left. Supplies are limited. If ideas continue more than four hours, consult your physician. Do not operate heavy machinery while reading.
Anyway, de Solla Price was the first person to point out that 90% of all scientists who have ever lived are alive now, that science information had increased so much since WWII that not even physicists can possibly read every physics article even in a given year. He lamented that cutting edge science no longer took place in peer-reviewed journals but on list-serves (kind of a proto-email), and that most physicists can barely keep up with reading abstracts of other people’s work. By the time anything gets into a book, it is old news.
Norbert Weiner (which I’m sorry is just the name of a person who is begging for a wedgie) knew this in the 1950s. His Cybernetics movement tried to address information overload in a totally half-assed way because it ignored that serious people no longer got props or tenure unless they specialized. Serious people concluded that there was too much information out there to assess the Big Picture, so they the concept of big pictures with post modernism. At the same time society decided that it was time to uninvisiblize women, minorities, gays, immigrants, zines, comic books, pornography, a whole continuum of information, some incredibly valuable, some background noise, with no theory to decide which was which.
Who is now driving the engine of science news?
By smashing everything with the same giant whack-a-mole hammer, academics lost the ability to differentiate between trivia and significa. “Who says Deaf Studies is less useful than Engineering?”
Which brings us inevitably back to the Infopocalypse. The term comes from Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (1992). His fanciful novel explores the interconnection between a computer’s “blue screen of death,” which I don’t think happens any more, and the human mind crashing from too much information. His views are congruent with the occult information I’ve mentioned, and he adds a bit of neat ancient scholarship which evidently was contributed by his brother-in-law.
Robert Anton Wilson was born 56 years earlier in the same hospital as my son. Wilson had a long, strange trip through life which included brushes with Lilly, Leary, Crowley Michell and many others. He was a stoner, a conspiracy theorist who was best known for the Illuminati trilogy. But he also founded the Institute for the Study of the Human Future in 1975. He was the seminal writer on the issue of brain crash. He intuited the gist and sounded the alarm. If you look him up, expect a lot of Chief Wiggam/ Richard Dawkins type people to tell you it is “Fatuous crap.”
Thus, I will not quote mullet-headed McGivers because I’m trying to be sort of serious, but Wilson is kind of cool. Francis Heylighen wrote a lucid paper about overload in 2002. He estimated that between Roman times and the Renaissance, the maximum speed of information transmittal was .003 bps. Add the printing press and the postal service. By the 19th century, when telegraphs were introduced, information transmittal jumped to 3 bps. Add in telephones, radios, etc. and by the 1960s he says it was 300 bps. Add in personal computers, faxes, whatever, and in 2002 it was 60,000 bps.
Add YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and so forth, and how do you even calculate the bits per second we’re expected to or could digest right now? Seriously, Yitz, Sebastian, Phil how do you do this? I’ve always been pretty lazy when it comes to math. Phil is getting his Ph.D. in mathematics, and he is one of the most brilliant, coolest people I know. We were drinking beers one night and we tried to convert a hectare into square feet. Without machines we were helpless. We were also sort of drunk, but you get the idea.
All day, every day, Wendy, who formerly had a breath-taking library, tap, tap, taps on the little silver box the Mac people call a computer. I read an article at Jezebel.com deriding Virginia Slims as a cynical marketing ploy to get girls to smoke. I look at Wendy’s intuitive, highly illogical Mac and wonder if anything has changed. She and I have a lot of conversations where we conclude that women are from Mac and men are from penis, but the fact is that we can’t help one another with glitches because the technology between us is too alien.
Wendy and I sit 20 feet away from one another in separate rooms and send emails back and forth. My friend Scott and his partner Jose sit side by side in their beautiful study and sometimes do the same thing. A woman was recently kicked off Twitter for sending 400 twits daily, which made the program conclude that she was a spambot. I think she is a spambot, but in a different, much more insidious way.
My purely anecdotal, unscientific sense of the internet these days is that it is beginning to fold over on itself. Does anyone use still AIM these days? Are any bands still breaking out on myspace? Has anyone checked their Friendster account this year? Even on Facebook, there are the determined solipsists/narcissists who just keep pissing in the data stream, but mostly, people I joined to interact with in the first place have concluded it is too much of a bother, the novelty has worn off, which only leaves the people who have decided that Facebooking/Twittering (which is the same thing, as I’m sure you know) is what Bedlamites do when the rest of the asylum has gone to sleep.
A young friend of mine who used to be very sophisticated about using the internet to promote his music realized to his chagrin that no one reads blogs any more. I bet you aren’t reading this one, because frankly, who has the time? In 2005, I used to read about 20 blogs weekly. Every single one of these people has quit writing, perhaps because it is too much effort, or maybe because they are over themselves or perhaps because they reached a point of overload. And besides, you can accomplish as much in a tweet, which is easy, as opposed to a blog, which is hard.

Heylighen’s paper http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/papers/Info-overload.pdf
J. Hu’s 1995 paper http://matwbn.icm.edu.pl/ksiazki/fm/fm155/fm15533.pdf