28 – #SIREN

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A massive earthquake, far out to sea. The ocean floor shakes and spreads and ruptures, moving billions of litres of water. The trembling stops, and news spreads. Immediately people turn to their mobiles, reaching out to check in with their family and friends. Are they ok? Where are they? What just happened? Everyone knows an earthquake has come — but how big? Will there be another? Did anything come down? Is everyone alright?

Everyone asks these questions simultaneously.

The mobile network, overloaded, begins to stutter. Text messages fail. Calls cut off in mid-sentence. There is signal – you can see the bars on your mobile’s screen – but no connectivity. Not knowing, not being able to connect and learn, amplifies the sense of crisis. Something bad is happening. And you don’t even know how bad.

Seismologists set to work, read their graphs, make some calculations, and form a prediction. The seafloor has been sufficiently disturbed to produce a ‘harbour wave’ – in Japanese, tsunami – spreading out from the epicenter, across the Andaman Sea and Indian ocean. Supercomputers generate a visualization of the spread of this wave, based on the size of the temblor and the topology of the ocean floor. That gets published to a website, and is immediately copied and posted to Twitter, where it is shared a few hundred more times:

Tsunami Prediction Forecast

The international news networks, CNN and BBC and Al Jazeera, begin rolling coverage of the earthquake. They show the visualization, calling out the predicted landfall times of the tsunami, one after another. Aceh. Phuket. Andaman Islands.

It all has a horrible feeling of deja vu, because the sequence of events appears eerily similar to the Boxing Day earthquake and tsunami of 2004, when a magnitude 9.0 temblor produced a wave up to 15 meters high in some places, killing well over three hundred thousand people. People died in such numbers because no one knew the tsunami was coming. Even after the prediction had been made, there was no way to warn everyone in the tsunami’s path.

In 2004, little more than a billion people owned mobiles, and most of those lived in the developed world, not the Indian Ocean basin. Not yet connected, they could not be reached. They could not be warned.

A quarter of a billion seconds later, more than four and a half billion own mobiles, many of these new owners concentrated in India, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia and Sri Lanka – precisely the countries most affected by the devastation of the last tsunami. Systems have been deployed, both to detect a tsunami, and to spread the alarm. Text messaging – originally developed to provide a channel to send emergency messages to many mobiles simultaneously – shares news of the predicted tsunami with great rapidity. Anyone who doesn’t get the message – or doesn’t have a mobile – learns of the prediction from someone who got the message.

The authorities issue an evacuation order. Everyone within a few meters of sea level must relocate to higher ground. There is no resistance to the command; memories of 2004 are too fresh. People begin a relatively orderly migration away from the shoreline, into the hills. Numerous signs – installed after the last tsunami – direct people toward specific evacuation zones. Someone uses their mobile to snap a photo of the evacuation in Phuket, posting it to Twitter, where it is quickly shared around:

No one knows if the tsunami will come; some earthquakes, lifting the earth up, produce monster waves, while others, shuffling the crust from side to side, do little more than stir up the water. Seismologists seem confident this earthquake belongs to the second (and less dangerous) category, but reports come in over Twitter, shared and shared again, sightings of vast areas of exposed seabed in Phuket. The drawing back of the sea is a sure sign of an incoming tsunami; everyone knows this. But reports are not proof, and the reports conflict. Eyewitnesses report one thing, government officials report another. Finally, someone shares a photo of a Phuket beach, taken with a mobile and uploaded to Twitter, then shared and shared and shared:

Sea recession in Phuket 11 April 2012

It looks as though the sea has vanished. But who can say? The debate rages, even as people continue making their way to the designated evacuation areas. Some of the evacuees use Twitter to share their own observations – how orderly it seems, how there is no real fear, just a sense of urgency.

Newscasters blithely report that – according to predictions – the tsunami should have already engulfed Aceh. They’re waiting for word, running the same few seconds of video from Aceh, taken in the moments following the earthquake: people running from buildings, standing in the street, waiting. But they’re not just waiting. At least half of them are talking on their mobiles, or staring down into them, connecting. Each using their own connectivity to build an awareness of everyone and everything of importance to them:

Phuket mall evacuation area

CNN International, waiting for news from Aceh, begins to show some of the photos people have shared on Twitter: evacuations, traffic jams, long lines of people on the move. “You see everyone in these pictures on their phones,” the newscaster adds. “They’re getting information about what to do.”

No great wave destroys Aceh again, nor Phuket, nor the Andaman islands. No buildings have come down, either in the initial quake, nor in the aftershock – so big that by itself it will be one of the biggest earthquakes of the year. Another tsunami warning follows the aftershock. People continue to wait, and share:

Evacuating and waiting in Phuket

Eventually, the all clear comes, and people climb down from their high places, breathing a sigh of relief. Was this just a mass fright, shared at the speed of light across a hyperconnected planet, or simply sensible behavior? No one died, but no one was in any real danger. Better to be safe than sorry, surely. Now that we are all connected, we know that others will share with us when we come into danger.

27 – #SPHERE

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Once we connect, we begin to share. No one has to tell us to share ourselves: this is who we are. As we share with others, and they share with us, we learn more about them. We share something important to us, and they respond. Where that sharing triggers a memory, hope, or resonance, they respond positively, sharing something of their own experience with us, and that moment is reinforced. Where our sharing is meaningless – or worse, upsetting – we receive little encouragement, even silence. We remember this as well.

Each of these sharing moments become the shape of our relationships. Moments become memories, and eventually these memories acquire a life of their own, a rendering of the relationship into a miniature version of someone whom you’ve shared with and who has shared with you. This model grows more complete as these shared moments of sharing accumulate. From our point of view at the center of our personal universe, these shared moments compose that person – or at least all of that person we can ever know.

Everyone you know well, you know well precisely because of the accumulation of those sharing moments. Sharing is how we come to know one another. Our infant minds fill themselves up with mom and dad (mostly mom). Only gradually do we learn how to sort all of those other people out. Our circles of connections grow wider as our minds find the room to house a battalion of individuals. Without memory of the shared moments of sharing, all human contact would exist within an eternal present, a Memento-like state where no one could ever matter. Without memory, there is no relationship, and without sharing, there is no memory.

Each of our relationships grows from sharing, conforming to the boundaries established by that sharing, and tends to reinforce that we already know. Like shares with like. If we want to talk about the latest movies, we know whom to turn to. If we want to gripe about our employer, we know who will provide a sympathetic ear. And if we want to speculate about our own possibilities, we know who’s willing to join us on our flights of fancy. The ‘echo chamber’ of human culture — which recirculates the same truisms endlessly between like-minded individuals — did not begin with the Internet; it is as old as speech. We need to have our beliefs confirmed, fears soothed and secrets held. We focus upon the relationships which provide these.

We grow from knowing nothing about one another to knowing everything needed to breathe life into a simulacrum, a mind’s-eye version. We know a handful of people exceptionally well, sharing with them continuously. We know a larger number reasonably well, certainly enough to find some excuse to share something with them as desire or opportunity presents. We know enough people well enough to share something in common with them. These three levels of intimacy emerged from the familial and tribal bonds of our common heritage. We have always needed to share ourselves with those in the tribe: sharing means survival.

Our ability to share meaningfully defines the boundaries of the tribe, and limits it. Relationships nourish and tax in equal amounts. Time and attention and dedication keep our relationships fresh. Friends ‘drift apart’ when they forget to feed their relationship, eventually becoming estranged. We all know the odd feeling of meeting someone we once knew well, but now hardly know. The memory of relationship remains, like dried bones. This happens and needs to happen because we can not feed every relationship equally. Some people enter our lives to stay, some only drift through. We retain something as they depart, but most gets lost as we plow over the ground of that relationship to make room for another. We have limits, and can only sow our minds with so many simultaneous relations.

Estimates vary, but something between one hundred and fifty (the so-called ‘Dunbar Number’) and two hundred and fifty seems to be the upper limit on the number of active and well-fed relationships we can manage. This conforms to the size of tribal groupings known from the study of paleoanthropology and prehistory, as well as examinations of the hunter-gatherer cultures still with us today in Amazonia and New Guinea. Tribes make manifest the limits of memory and relation, never growing beyond the natural confines of our ability to hold everyone within our heads.

Ten thousand years away from the tribes, we carry these same boundaries in our modern minds, but whereas once everyone within a tribe held the same set of individuals in their heads, no one today has precisely the same array of relations. Even husbands and wives, in a lifetime together, maintain separate social spheres. We overlap and intersect, but instead of a single unit of blood and tribe, we span multitudes. Each of us knows one hundred and fifty others well, and each of those know one hundred and fifty well. Even with a fair bit of overlap, you and the people you know well know more than ten thousand people well. Those ten thousand know a million well. The million know a hundred million. That hundred million know everyone. This ‘six degrees of separation’ emerges from the relations of sharing and memory which once kept our horizons narrowly focused on the tribe, but which now (with a little mixing and connecting) spans the species.

Every one of us, everywhere, resides in the embrace of this ‘human network’ of relations built from shared moments of sharing. This network presents us the opportunity to share our experiences, or learn from the experiences of others. Above the broad physical network of communications – the wires and waves of Internet and mobile – an invisible but pervasive, highly mediated, but entirely human network reinforces our relationships with every act of sharing. The sphere of our relations has grown to encompass the whole world.

26 – #SQUARE

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Monday afternoon in Australia is Sunday evening in America, and that can only mean one thing: file-sharing. Home Box Office airs their most popular shows on Sunday evenings, series like The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, and, on this particular evening, the premiere of the second series of Game of Thrones. Sitting at the end of a long chain of producers and distributors, Australians always endured long waits before a television series made it to air – if it made it at all. In a still-remembered incident, a commercial broadcaster yanked The West Wing off the air in the middle of its fourth series, leaving hundreds of thousands of loyal viewers up in the air.

At just that moment in time – the middle years of the 2000s – television audiences gained a power that had been tightly held by broadcasters – the ability to distribute a program. A broadcaster raises an antenna (or buys a cable channel), then has the right – a monopoly, really – to use that bandwidth as they see fit. If they want to fill the airwaves with home shopping, car crashes, or haute couture catwalks, that’s their privilege. Scarce, bandwidth had to be meted out carefully, with some lip service to the public interest – hence the public broadcasters – but inevitably creating an interlocking ecosystem of corruption, as broadcasters and public officials worked in lockstep to keep bandwidth a strictly limited resource. Audiences wanting to watch these programs accepted that broadcasters controlled the only mechanism to distribute them.

In 1999, changes in distribution methods emerged on college campuses throughout the United States. Shawn Fanning, a student at Boston’s Northeastern University, developed software that allowed his friends to share their music collections across the campus broadband network. Nicknamed ‘Napster’ after Fanning’s curls, the software quickly mushroomed in popularity, not just at Northeastern, but at every other American university offering high-speed Internet access.

Napster scanned a user’s hard drive, compiling a list of all music files, sending that list off to a central computer. When another user searched for a particular piece of music – perhaps the fourth movement of Beethoven’s 9th symphony – they would be presented with a list of the different users who offered it as part of their music collection. A Napster user could then click on a particular user, and the track would be copied directly from the user who offered to share the music to the user requesting it. Napster’s superdistribution essentially converted the Internet into a gigantic disc drive, with the contents of any one computer available to every other computer. This ‘file-sharing’, as it became to be known, created a unified, global platform for the exchange of any type of media.

Napster did not last long. Although each individual user had purchased their music, the recording industry sued Napster, claiming it provided tools which enabled and encouraged widespread copyright violation. Unsurprisingly, the courts agreed, and Napster – that is, its centralized database – went dark in August 2000. Over fourteen million people used Napster in the days before it disappeared, each of whom experienced the exhilaration of a vast catalog of music available for their enjoyment. Although much of the file-sharing involved the most popular music of the day – Metallica, for example – many users shared recordings too rare or obscure to be widely available. Napster briefly became a treasure trove of audio gems, and sensitized a generation to the power of sharing.

Just days after Napster closed down, Gnutella launched. In contrast to Napster’s centralized – and vulnerable – design, Gnutella’s users searched one another’s computers directly, forming a ‘peer-to-peer network’, each asking all the others for music. Without a center to sue into oblivion, the recording industry took to suing individual file-sharers, an effort akin to boiling the sea. Since its introduction, peer-to-peer file-sharing has seen a steadily growing volume of content distributed, despite intense efforts to shut them down, disrupt or poison them.

Gnutella’s peer-to-peer networks had one weakness: they could not deal well with high demand for an item in short supply. If a user had a the only copy of a particularly prized song, they would be flooded with requests answered serially. If you were toward the front of the request queue, you’d be fine, but if you arrived after a few thousand others, you’d be waiting a very long time for that song. As people began to share television programs and movies – hundreds of times the size of songs – this problem became acute.

An ingenious solution to this problem came from bright programmer named Bram Cohen, who realized each copy of an item could be used as a source for subsequent copies. Let’s say, for example, I’d like to share a copy of this book. I have a copy machine which I can use to make copies, and as each person queues a request, I make a copy of the book, hand it to them, then start making a copy of the book for the next person in the queue. Lengthy, laborious — and the way Gnutella works.

With Cohen’s insight – known as BitTorrent – I would break the book up into individual pages, make a copy of each of these, and give one page to each person in the queue. Once each person has a page, I tell them each about one another. They also have copy machines, so they start to share furiously with one another, asking one another for copies of the pages they don’t have. In short order, everyone has a complete copy of the book.

A resource shared is a resource squared. With BitTorrent, sharing becomes a shared task, squaring the power of sharing, transforming superdistribution into hyperdistribution. Hyperdistribution means anyone, anywhere can share a file of any size with everyone, everywhere. The restrictions on bandwidth which effectively barred individuals from acting as broadcasters have fallen away.

Once the public learned of hyperdistribution, they began to self-distribute all sorts of media: music, movies, television, software, databases – anything that could be digitized was now freely and widely distributed — including episodes of television shows such as The West Wing and Game of Thrones. Freed from being the whipping-boys of television programmers, Australians became the most profligate downloaders of television on the planet. Audience-driven distribution – sharing via hyperdistribution – had supplanted television broadcasting.

25 – #SHARE

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Silence is not an innate skill among human beings. Quite the opposite. From time out of mind, our success has depended upon our ability to share everything we know with anyone who might need to know it. On the African savanna, sharing indicated the presence of predators, a sighting of a favoured plant, or the signs of an approaching thunderstorm. The more effectively we shared as individuals, the more successfully the group could prepare for and respond to any challenges. Sharing means survival. The forces of natural selection have favoured sharing, so we find ourselves at the end of a long line of people who simply could not shut up. Blessed are those who share, for their numbers will increase.

Sharing as a species hearkens back to our beginnings, and ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny: we can watch as sharing behaviors emerge in children. From our earliest moments, fresh from the womb, we begin to share ourselves. Babies move their arms and legs in syncopation to mother’s voice, dancing to her soothing tones. The infant freely offers up their internal, inchoate emotional state with smiles and gurgles and cries and screams, and continue sharing for the entire span of our lives.

Ask a small child to share a favoured toy — and prepare yourself for a battle of wills. Ask that same child to share the details of their day, then sit back as a stream-of-consciousness flow of associations, impressions and memories pours forth. We must be taught to share our things, yet must learn restraint when sharing our thoughts. Such is our need to speak our minds, keeping secrets requires almost superhuman reserves of willpower and fortitude.

In the beginning, we share with those most closely related to us: mother and father, siblings, grandparents, aunts and uncles. As we grow into greater independence, capable of forging our own connections, we share with friends, neighbors, and classmates. By the time we reach adulthood, that circle of sharing extends out to colleagues, acquaintances, and the community.

Ten thousand years ago sharing reached its natural limits at the boundaries of tribal kinship. Five thousand years ago, the walls of the city would have framed our span. Five hundred years ago, we could write our thoughts into a book, send it to the printers, and see ourselves eventually shared throughout the world.

In the age of hyperconnectivity sharing becomes immediate, instantaneous, and universal. Everything we share always goes global, even if it only rarely becomes pervasive. We share ourselves freely, believing our sharing bound by the gravitational forces which have always dragged our thoughts back to earth, but everything has now become weightless photons, and travels without interruption at the speed of light. There is no barrier, anywhere — not even within ourselves.

The hyperconnected leak information, always sharing something. At a minimum we share our presence on the network, this being the first sin that leads to a multitude of transgressions, revelation by derivation: Presence becomes location. Location becomes movement. Movement becomes activity. Activity becomes intent. Everything, from barely anything at all.

Revelation is the common, persistent and continuous condition of the four-and-a-half-billion-and-counting hyperconnected. It is not that there is no privacy anymore; rather, the performance of any act becomes its broadcast, traced out in presence, and, once shared, drawn into a world of meanings attached to our actions. We neither surrendered our privacy nor had it taken away: privacy and connectivity are fundamentally oppositional. Satisfying both simultaneously has proven impossible.

Since we did not give up our privacy, we are not aware that it has vanished, except in those still somewhat rare but increasingly common moments when we become wholly visible to one another. We can generate a peculiar quality of light, where everyone is revealed, all the connections we assumed in innocence casting menacing shadows.

A telephone carrier knows where each of its subscribers are (or at least their mobiles) at every moment. Mobiles, aware of their location, share this information with various services, together with any other relevant information. This sharing expands our awareness. We can know when our friends approach, or a taxicab, or a potential employer. Sifting through this sharing, taking from it the bits most relevant to the present need, reveals the hidden. A recent example: Girls around Me.

Creepy on first sight (an obvious playground for stalkers) the deeper one looks, the more interesting it becomes. Why women? Why not footy fans, car hoons or budgerigar fanciers? Why not Jews? Or skinheads? Or anyone who in any way differs from me enough to present a threat? The shout that once alerted us to a predator on the African savannah has become an message on the screen of our smartphone.

No one need explicitly share themselves in order to be thus captured, qualified, filtered and portrayed. All becomes apparent from connections, associations, movements and activities. Like attracts like, and this reveals more than we would ever willingly provide. Connection is the only light required to reveal absolutely everything.

We find ourselves utterly exposed, sharing everything without hesitation and without volition. We are completely known but do not yet know this. We believe we encompass mystery, that something can be withheld. The space for secrets has grown miniscule, as every act, connected, shared and broadcast globally, tells others more about us than we dare admit to ourselves.

Believing ourselves shy, we nonetheless desire to know the minds of others, longing to learn who to connect with around the topics of importance to us, and who we must avoid in order to preserve ourselves. Threat and opportunity: human drives have changed little in ten thousand years, but now everyone hears our moments of crisis and triumph. These moments act as beacons, allowing us to find one another.

 

24 – #DISCONNECT

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On those rare moments when we can not connect, whether flying, deep under a building, or out beyond the edges of mobile coverage, when we glance into our palm and see NO SIGNAL, we feel the tug and pull of this new, invisible organ. We want to connect, even if we have no reason. The reassurance we find in one another’s presence has become a persistent feature of our lives.

Yet when we connect with another person, we conform to the needs of a dynamic created whenever we come together. Communication is a dance, and like any dance requires the full engagement of both parties. Otherwise, someone might trip and spill to the floor. Two people, connected, can be quite intense. When it becomes three, four, or more, it becomes a party. Parties are hard work: when you’re at a party you’re only thinking about the other people at the party. It becomes your whole world.

Now the whole world has become a party. The moments when we are not connected to at least one other person have grown vanishingly rare. Most often we connect to many others, via SMS and chat and Twitter and Skype and Facebook and Google+ and Yammer and Foursquare and, and, and… The ways we connect have multiplied as we grow more connected, a process accelerating as we come to understand how to use our connectivity toward specific ends.

We can spend all of our waking hours connected. For the generation born and raised during the last half billion seconds, that isn’t even a choice: it’s simply the way things are. Connection is the default posture for Homo Nexus, even at the expense of the real. People stare into their mobiles while they wait at bus stops; pedestrians walk into traffic, obliviously absorbed in their mobile; drivers get into accidents trying to send or read a text message at speed. Connectivity is pervasive, and connectivity is addictive. Once we have it, we will not willingly do without it. Yet we must.

When we connect and involve ourselves immediately in the lives of others, we surrender the ability to be involved within ourselves. This is no mere narcissism, but rather its opposite: the capacity to be with oneself, and within oneself, to reflect and meditate, is the root of our private experience. Without the silence that comes from solitude, there is no self.

We find ourselves in a perilous situation. We have embraced hyperconnectivity and the constant companionship of others, but in order to be authentically ourselves with others, we need to pull away, nursing within ourselves our own distinctive qualities – emotional, intellectual, physical, and spiritual – that come only when we face ourselves alone. The self itself is under threat, not because of the erosion of privacy, or the inversion of public and private spaces, but because we can not find the time to tend it.

We need to strike a balance between the power and joy of connection and the internal strength which comes from solitude. Neither is wholly good, nor entirely the answer: our future lies somewhere between the hermit and the hive. We know that we need to cut our connections in order to focus our thoughts, but we must extend this obvious truth into a broader recognition of the importance of feeding both halves of our nature.

We must admit that we are not very good at managing the ‘hygiene’ of our connected selves. Our parents taught us to brush our teeth and wash behind our ears, but no one has shown us how to pull the plug, or why we should. This is all brand new, and it is all brand new for all of us. There was no vanguard of Homo Nexus who could pass along the lessons they learned. We became this new thing all together, and all at once. We have been robbed of the most fundamental form of mimesis – the imitation of our parents and elders – because there are no parents, no elders. We must learn from one another.

Our children, who have grown up constantly connected, have no role models to show them that disconnection will make them great. They look to us, see us fumbling through emails at the dinner table, reaching for the phone every time a text message arrives, recognizing us as captives of connectivity. This is the behavior they reproduce – doing as we do, not as we say – and for this reason we can not rely on them to develop the habits of healthfulness around connection. They have no innate sense of the importance of solitude, nor any external examples of its value. We must first teach ourselves, and only then can we presume to teach our children – by example.

Our predicament is not a matter of fault, or blame. It is as if a car we were driving along suddenly acquired a rocket engine. For a while we zoom along dangerously, but eventually we learn how to tap the accelerator pedal gently, so that we can keep within the speed limit, and avoid a wreck. Now that we are connected, our first most important task must be  to master the balance between our drive to connect and our need for solitude. We must develop the skills to nurse ourselves – every day – for our own good. At present, we’re like overexcited toddlers, filled to overflowing with all of the day’s events, and unable to go to sleep. We must soothe ourselves, and we can only do that in solitude.

Solitude is not the opposite of connection, but its complement. Turning the mobile off and putting it away – for an hour, an evening, or a day – does not separate you from the body of Homo Nexus. We are all so well connected that none of can easily slip through the common net of connection. But we have neither protocol nor etiquette for the practice of solitude. We must be able to slip away gracefully, leaving others with the understanding that this brief parting will only deepen the moments to follow. We must look forward to solitude, embracing ourselves. For many, solitude feels unfamiliar, unfriendly, and unpleasant. We need to share the joys of solitude, so they, too, tug at us, when we have been away from ourselves for too long.

For the last half billion seconds we have gorged ourselves at the banquet of connection. Now we need some time to digest what we have taken in. Pausing will only make the meal more delicious, when we return to it. Some have launched their own “Technology Sabbath” (invoking the strict Jewish practice of no work from sunset Friday through sunset Saturday), putting aside their mobiles and computers for one day in seven, using that time to focus themselves in prayer or meditation, in uninterrupted playtime with their children, or anything else that brings them into quiet and reflective contemplation.

The specifics may not work for everyone, but all of us need something like this. We need to be able to draw a line around our connected selves, containing what we have become before it leaves nothing of us. That line evolves from strict to supple as we become comfortable moving back and forth between connection and solitude. Like children, at the beginning we require boundaries. As we mature, and internalize the new rules of Homo Nexus, we will be better able to decide for ourselves the space we make for being.

A half billion seconds ago, we knew solitude well, and were not afraid of it. Today, aware only of continuous connection, we have almost forgotten this other side to ourselves. It must not be lost as we turn this corner. It is the seat of our soul.

23 – #LOSS

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“I can’t wait to get my implant.”

Staring at the woman, dumbfounded, I realize she wants to be cut open, perhaps behind the ear, with all of the delicate electronics that enable connectivity laced into the space underneath the skin, tucked up against her cranium like an ivy scaling an old brick wall. She wants to link – to think, and be connected.

She finds this idea irresistible.

The only way I can confront this unexpected lust for the future – rushing to embrace a wave of annihilating change – is with the unvarnished truth. “Where is your mobile right now?”

“Here,” she says, gesturing at her handbag.

“And where is it when you go to sleep at night?”

“On the bedstand, right next to me. It’s my alarm clock.”

“When is your mobile ever more than a meter away from you?”

She considers this. “When I’m in the shower, maybe. That’s about it.”

“Why do you need to get an implant? It’s already effectively part of you. What do you gain by putting it inside of you?” She wrestles with this question for the brief moment it takes her to accept that she has already arrived at her destination. She already has an implant.

Nearly all of us carry our mobiles with us nearly all the time. The vast majority of us sleep next to them, restoring ourselves as they recharge. We are no longer ever alone, not even for a moment.

This loss has gone unnoticed. We grow alarmed at a loss of signal, but seem unable to recognize the absence of a penumbra of quiet which had always been available to us, before hyperconnectivity. We could step away from the world, away from the interruptions and influences of others, away from their thoughts and feelings, and be wholly in ourselves.

We immediately adapted to the continuous presence of others, moving from an empty mansion into a crowded, noisy hostel without missing a beat. We wear the close connectivity of the tribe as comfortably as an old pair of shoes. The oldest parts of us instinctively understand how to be within relations that endure without interruption. We evolved as creatures always within a convenient cooee. Now that call has gone global, restoring everything lost in the flowering of civilization. In hyperconnectivity we have both the anonymity of the mob and the definite identity of the tribe. We may have no particular location, but we are noticed the moment we disappear.

Emergency services have recently seen a sharp uptick in the number of hikers needing a quick recovery from the bush. Hikers stroll into Australia’s substantial parklands, never bothering to file a route plan with the relevant authorities, as it never occurs to them that they could find themselves many kilometers from the nearest cell tower, at the bottom of a ravine, lost, and needing assistance.

Confident in their connectivity, laden with GPS and mobile maps, thinking themselves the equal of any situation, they reach for their mobiles — only to find them useless — and encounter, perhaps for the first time, absolute solitude. The connection gives way to silence, and their confidence collapses. Never having been alone, they confront solitude without any resilience wrought from prior experience.

This same has become true for all of us: the sting of hyperconnectivity. The price we pay for being connected is a certain helplessness in its absence. Every time we reach for the mobile, turning to one another for assistance, we lose some innate capacity to confront the world by ourselves. These losses accumulate until, with half a billion seconds left to go, we could only turn back to our prior, disconnected selves with great difficulty and enormous resistance. We could choose to repent. Instead we accelerate toward this new combination of mutual aid and individual weakness.

Our actions as individuals become the movements of a global culture. At the end of 2008, when, for the first time in history, half of humanity became urban-dwellers, half of humanity owned their own mobile, a synchronicity revealing the alignment of old and new ideas of connectivity. The urban revolution took ten thousand years; the main body of Homo Nexus arrived in less than half a billion seconds, two cultural transformations intersecting in a shared conception of proximity.

The network collapses space to a single point, but, like the city, connectivity has its center, boundary, and areas beyond its reach. As they have always been, cities remain centers of connectivity, with some attention paid to the sprawling suburbs separating them from the vast and sparsely populated regions beyond. Eighty-five percent of the human race lives within range of a mobile signal (more than have access to clean water) but this coverage represents less than sixty percent of the Earth’s surface.

The lure of connectivity has been drawing us together for a hundred centuries. Hyperconnectivity draws a sharp line between the extensive capabilities of Homo Nexus and the rural, agrarian humanity out of signal range. During the next half billion seconds, the boundary will grow more distinct as this new urban form manifests itself in an explosion of capacity. Rural depopulation will accelerate as connectivity becomes irresistible and its absence unimaginable.

We will develop techniques to extend connectivity beyond the urban cores, satellites and longwave subsumed within the preeminent demand for continuous coverage, but the quality of that connection will be inversely proportional to the distance from the hyperconnected center. Some will adapt to life at the margins, but few will embrace that life willingly. We have surrendered our singular selves to the communion of others, and do not mourn the loss.

22 - #LOVE

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For the science-fiction epic Avatar, writer-director James Cameron invented the ecosystem of ‘Pandora’, a planet different from Earth, yet familiar enough to remain recognizable and sympathetic – equal parts Jurassic Park and Microcosmos. Every living thing glows a phosphorescent blue in the darkness of night (a conceit that looks stunning on screen), and all of the more complex animals come equipped with tendrils that provide a direct connection into the creature’s nervous system. The film’s hero, a human incarnated into an ‘avatar’ body, learns to ‘link’ with various animals – the Pandoran equivalents of horses and pterodactyls – in order to tame them. In the film’s central scene, the hero links with his romantic interest – a Pandoran princess – as the screen fades to black.

Cameron wrote the screenplay for Avatar in the mid-2000s, just when the mobile had become a fixed feature of life in the developed world. Science fiction frequently serves as a mirror into the present (Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four was actually about the Britain of 1948) and Cameron gave our new-found hyperconnectivity a physical basis in Pandoran physiology, making those implicit connections tangible and visible.

The climax of Avatar involves the defense of the ‘Tree of Souls’, portrayed as a vegetal nexus, bridging the gap between the ‘Na’vi’ (Pandora’s indigenous humanoids) and ‘Eywa’, the Pandoran world-soul. The Tree of Souls connects the Na’vi to their ancestors, to the Pandoran biosphere, and the divine. The resource-hungry human antagonists realize that the destruction of the Tree of Souls will reduce the Na’vi to a broken people, refugees on their own world, cut off from the greater life of Pandora, from their history, and from one another. Cameron highlighted the dread we feel when disconnected from the network, cleverly crafting a situation every hyperconnected individual could sympathize with.

Our connections are emotional. In our hearts, we feel their presence and absence. The emotional quality of our first connection – with our mothers – colours all others. That bond becomes the bridge to love, flowing unconditionally from child to mother. Every other connection carries within it the expectation of that unconditional love, and even if we never again achieve the surrender and innocence of our earliest moments, it remains our deepest wish. Adults frame these wishes against their experience of connection – complicated, fraught, often clumsy – while adolescents, closer to their origins, believe every connection will reproduce the love they learned from mother. Time teaches them to lower their expectations.

The mobile has become the visible manifestation of the emotions evoked by our connections. Although, unlike the tendrils of the Pandorans, they have not burrowed their way beneath into our biology, we carry our mobiles everywhere. We use them to link with one another, consult the spirits of the ancestors (through their writings), and, as we watch feeds and updates scroll by, tune into the whispers of the global mind. We may imagine ourselves separate, but we yearn to link with all, dissolving in a sea of love.

Tribal humanity, constantly connected across a lifetime, knew this connectivity intimately. Take a tribal human out the tribe and, stripped of the emotional presence they have always known, they lose their resilience, like toddler abandoned. The urban revolution brought the focus to smaller units of extended families, then the industrial revolution shattered that extended family into a spare, tiny nucleus. Just as this process reached its uttermost extent – with absolute individuation – the mobile created a new quality of connection. We now recover our original tribal connectivity, but at global scale.

The bond between mother and child has been touched by this hyperconnectivity. Dr. Genevieve Bell, Intel Fellow and Anthropologist-in-Residence, recorded an unexpected instance of this transformation in a South Korean classroom. Interviewing students whose parents had given them mobiles with GPS-tracking features – so parents could know precisely where those children are, every moment of the day – Dr. Bell asked these children if they felt comfortable under the steady gaze of constant parental surveillance. One child pointed toward another child in the room, saying, “She doesn’t have one of these phones. Her parents don’t love her enough to care where she is.” The child instinctively located the emotional relationship within the device.

Dr. Sherry Turkle, who has studied the relation of children and computing for a generation, has noted that children no longer differentiate from their parents as quickly or completely as before, and points to the mobile as the cause. When a child heads off to university, they now call the parent every day (sometimes several times a day) seeking information, advice, or just a sympathetic ear. The hard boundaries which previously marked entry into adulthood have grown fuzzy, because mobile omnipresence places the parent everywhere the child has a need.

Although Turkle believes this most recent phenomenon might represent a retardation of the processes of adulthood and individuation, it actually marks a return to the prelapsarian state before the utter individuation of late urbanization. Until quite recently – perhaps a hundred years ago – parents rarely separated from their children. Everyone remained within the same village – often within the same household – throughout an entire lifetime. This relation has been suddenly recovered, a reversal of a century of cultural patterns which created the knife-edge of instant adulthood. Children and parents now reside in a connection mediated by the mobile, omnipresent and continuous.

Because it is now possible, continuous emotional engagement has become an option in all our relations. We are seeking to recover the undifferentiated acceptance of our relation to our mothers, looking to every contact as a path back to this unity. Inevitably, we will be frustrated. From that frustration we are learning how to modulate our emotional boundaries on a global scale.

21 – #LOOK

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In any place where people congregate – a bus stop, an airport, the line at a cafe – they practice the same behavior. Where once they might have fidgeted, or set their gaze at a neutral distance (to better preserve the anonymity of the city), today each one stares down, into the tiny display cradled in their palm. Staring down, staring in, captured and captivated by the goings-on in another land.

A decade ago we never looked at our mobiles unless making a call. Five years ago we stared at them only while we carefully prepared a text message. Today we gaze into them constantly, almost continuously. Something has changed.

The most obvious change concerns the device itself, which evolved from a very simple alphanumeric display – 3 or 4 lines of 20 characters – into something more akin to a videogame console than a telephone, bristling with processing power, colorful, high-resolution graphics, stereophonic sound, and a surface sensitive to the slightest touch. This ‘smartphone’ realizes the Star Trek vision of the handheld communicator/tricorder (two hundred years ahead of schedule), a flexible, personal device capable of being put to work in practically any situation.

That’s certainly part of what’s going on, but even in the areas of the world where the smartphone hasn’t begun to penetrate (three and a half billion of the planet’s four and a half billion mobile-owning individuals do not own a smartphone) the behavior persists. The smartphone provides plenty of excuses to look down into the device, but they aren’t necessary.

Everyone else – and even those with a smartphone – stares into the device because they’re engaged in conversations, 160 characters at time, in the form of text messages. Over seven trillion text messages were sent last year, a thousand for every person on Earth, with a good percentage of people sending or receiving a hundred messages a day. Teenagers think nothing of spending spare time connecting and communicating with friends through text messages; easily sending and receiving three thousand a month.

These sound like huge numbers, almost as if texting represents a habitual, addictive behavior, but reframed it becomes less scary: What if these teenagers spoke five thousand sentences a month? We’d wonder what had made them so quiet and withdrawn. Texting carries our conversations across space, completely natural to teenagers who have never known anything but hyperconnectivity.

The first mobiles with text messaging features did not tout this capability. In the beginning, few saw any real value in text messaging. Mobile hardware manufacturers added text messaging into their products as an afterthought, buried behind a confusing array of menus. Nothing about first-generation text messaging was easy: Most people had no idea they could send a text message until they received one, when they would learn both how to read the message and send a reply.

Despite all these difficulties, people learned how use text messaging, then taught their friends to do the same, by sending them messages. As messages shot around, more people began to send messages, in a loop of positive feedback which brought us to the trillions of the present day.

Carriers were soon earning more from text messages (which cost almost nothing to send) than from voice calls. Mobile handset manufacturers transformed their devices into messaging machines, demoting the mobile’s voice call capabilities in favor of an interface geared around text messages. The users of the mobile had changed the design of the device, by their patterns of use.

These next generation messaging machines removed most of the barriers to effective messaging. People could manage many more conversations – serially and concurrently – and the number of text messages sent began to accelerate, because people had a platform which reflected their own desire to reach out and connect with others. Texting grew from a rare activity into an occasional practice, eventually becoming a nearly continuous behavior.

Text messages have well-known shortcomings, including message length, lack of rich media, and clumsy keyboard interfaces. (While it is possible to use a 10-digit telephone keypad to type a novel, it often can be and infuriating experience.) People wanted to be able to communicate without any of the constraints of text messages (because of the design of the carrier networks, these constraints were set in stone), so demand grew for more flexible messaging tools.

The immediate and overwhelming popularity of Research In Motion’s BlackBerry platform, seamlessly integrating electronic mail into the mobile experience – with a full, if tiny keyboard – demonstrated the pent-up desire to move beyond text messaging. Other devices, such as Danger’s Hiptop, effectively positioned the mobile as a device that was all about messaging, handling voice calls as an afterthought. Once again, users had driven design changes in mobile devices, making these devices more useful to them, leading to higher levels of usage, and more attention paid to the device. Gradually, we were being drawn in.

By the mid 2000s, the mobile had become more message center than voice communication, with SMS, email and a growing number of new messaging environments, such as Twitter, Facebook and AIM. In order to accommodate so many different conduits for communication, the mobile had to become a general-purpose communications platform: a fully-functional and openly programmable computer. Nokia introduced the first of these highly flexible devices – known as ‘smartphones’ – in 2007, soon followed by devices developed at Apple, Google, and Microsoft.

The smartphone can perform any function of a desktop computer and any function of a mobile, marrying the rich experience of desktop Internet and pervasive wireless hyperconnectivity in a single point of contact, producing an explosive growth in the range of messaging options available, and exponential growth in the number of messages being delivered across all formats. The smartphone continuously offers up a stream of messages. As a result, the smartphone has become nearly impossible to ignore for more than a few moments.

The smartphone itself – metal, glass, plastic and silicon – is not the source of this seductive glamour, unworthy of such dedicated attention. Its surface – the ‘black mirror’ of the display – acts as the individual’s portal to the connected world. Shaped through trillions of messages and half a billion seconds of directed engineering, our hyperconnectivity has produced a nearly ideal tool for communication. From their comfortable homes within our hands, mobiles shine a light so alluring we can no longer look away.

20 – #LEGION

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The world encompasses more than fishermen and limousine drivers, but these stories set the tone for our entire species: being connected means being more successful, and the more connected you are, the more successful you can be. Charles the limousine driver needed to double his connectivity to improve his earning capability. If the situation demanded a dozen smartphones, spread out against his dashboard, he’d do that, because each additional connection would add to his earning potential. The devices would pay for themselves, and Charles would be fat with connectivity and profits.

That’s exactly what the fishermen in Kerala realized. One fisherman with a mobile is omniscient – a seeing man in the land of the blind. A thousand fisherman, each with their own mobile, become a single, emergent, efficient market supply. The space between these two states – the single fisherman and the mobile as fisherman’s essential tool – is incredibly brief. Everyone within the market simultaneously recognizes that in order to realize their greatest profits, they must connect.

In villages and cities throughout the developing world, one scene has played out in endless repetitions over the last half billion seconds: an individual with a bit of money purchases a mobile. That mobile connects this individual to the marketplace, opening them to a range of economic opportunities, some of which the individual takes advantage of, improving their economic position. This individual is connected – in the flesh – to family and friends and colleagues, each of whom observe how the mobile has created new-found wealth for that individual.

Poorly educated people are not stupid; we are all born knowing how to imitate the behaviors of others, especially when that behavior confers tangible success. People save or borrow to acquire a mobile, and put that mobile to work for them, increasing their economic success. As a significant percentage of the population get mobiles, the advantages become more and more obvious, until everyone understands the relationship between the market and the mobile, and everyone migrates into mobile ownership.

This process of observation and imitation on a mass scale – hypermimesis – explains the unprecedented growth in the number of individuals owning mobiles. Barely sixty million owned a mobile in 1995; the end of 2012 will see us closing in on nearly five billion with at least one mobile device, a growth of nearly ten thousand percent in half a billion seconds. While many assumed adoption rates would slow after most of the world’s affluent bought a mobile, the adoption rate actually shot skyward, buoyed by the growing realization that future success depends upon connectivity.

In February 2012 China surpassed a billion mobile subscriptions, with nearly eight hundred million Chinese – greater than half the population – using a mobile. India, far poorer than newly-industrialized China, has nearly six hundred million subscribers. Africa – with less wealth than either Asian giant – has well over half a billion. Everywhere we look we see the mobile making inroads, but particularly in the poorest corners of the planet. People who barely have money for food will find the money to buy a mobile, because it represents the best opportunity they have ever had to increase their earning power.

Connectivity equals success. This has been demonstrated beyond any doubt. We sit in an in-between time, with the billion seconds following this discovery, but before it becomes the baseline behavior for our species. At the end of this billion seconds, being connected and being human will be seen as synonymous.

We are the species whose success relies upon our ability to communicate what we know to others around us. We put what others communicate to work. Some of what we communicate concerns how we communicate. When someone learns something about how to improve the connectivity between individuals, that information is shared. If it proves successful, those with whom this information was shared will share it again, radiating it through their own connections until the entire network – all five billion of us – act from this new understanding.

This new knowing expands the scope of our capabilities. We find that we can do more. We treasure these new powers, guarding them jealously, and mourning their loss in those situations – with a lost phone or a lost signal – where we can not put them into play. Rightly or wrongly, we tend to see our capabilities as us. As our capacities evolve, so our understanding of and expectations for ourselves change. We are locked into a loop of knowing and doing, with each of us directly connected to five billion others, every one of us intent on growing our own capabilities.

We hear the voices of others telling us things we need to know, sometimes whispered, sometimes repeated at deafening volumes. We whisper or shout, as need and opportunity allow. With everything we hear, we learn, and we do. This is all of us now, everywhere. We are all getting smarter, learning to do more, and as we learn and do, we learn better and do better, and learn to do better. We have plugged ourselves into an amplifier, turned to 11.

The most remarkable quality of the current moment is the pervasive whine of feedback, coursing through every human institution. Homo Nexus, locked within this amplifier, orients itself to the rising rush of power, so heady and seductive that it has already colored and now begins to drown out every other experience.

We are in too deep to turn back, swept up into a vortex of connection and empowerment, but past is merely prologue. Now inside the amplifier, each of us focuses on how to make it work for us, and with every thing we learn, our capabilities increase. It is ripping us away from what we were, half a billion seconds ago, thrusting us – collectively, connectively – into an entirely inescapable future.

19 – #LOOP

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Charles pulls up to the curb in a brand-new Lincoln Towncar, black and sleek, radiating wealth and privilege, and stops before me. His car is mine, and Charles is my driver — temporarily. I have magicked him up from my mobile, firing off a text message with my address to a service called Uber. I receive confirmation of receipt of my request, then, just a few seconds later, confirmation that Charles would be with me in three minutes.

If I had been using a smartphone, the process would have been slicker and more visual. I would have launched an app that would locate me – using GPS – then place me on a map, showing all of the nearby available limousines. After I my pickup request had been received and accepted, all of those limousines would disappear from the map, except the one coming to fulfil my request. As the car drew closer to me, I’d see it approach, allowing me to meet it precisely as it arrived. Seamless coordination, courtesy of the mobile.

Even though it costs a fair bit more than a taxi, with this kind of convenience Uber has been blessed with raging success. People like the feeling of control – real or perceived – that comes from watching their driver approach. While they stare down into the screen, Uber gives its users a sense of ominpresence. They know, if not everything, much more than ever before. That knowledge allows them to do more, giving them a small taste of the freedoms enjoyed by the very wealthiest.

Limousine drivers like Charles love Uber, too. Before the service launched, those drivers would spend half their time doing nothing, idling their hours while waiting for the next pickup call to come in. Drivers now add Uber jobs to their regularly scheduled pickups, nearly doubling their earning power within the same eight-hour shift. Mobiles have given limousine drivers the same economic acceleration that mobiles gave the fishermen of Kerala fifteen years ago – creating a highly efficient market which satisfies an increased demand, dramatically improving the earning potential of everyone connected.

Economists recognize that when a sudden change in market dynamics produces a burst of new wealth it encourages people to enter the marketplace. A ‘gold rush’ begins, as everyone looks for a way to vacuum up some of the new-found fortune. Most markets have ‘barriers to entry’ – to be a fisherman, you need a boat and rigging and nets and a crew; to be a driver you need a rather pricey limousine. These barriers make it difficult for the market to become immediately overcrowded, but the lack of competition increases the incentive for everyone already participating in the market to maximize their productive behavior. The more productive you can be within a closed but growing market, the more you will earn.

For Uber drivers, this means putting their limousines where they’re most needed. But they’re not alone in this, so the busiest parts of the city are also those with the greatest supply of drivers, which means drivers still have to wait for jobs. Even closed markets can be locally oversupplied – particularly where participants within a market can smell all the money to be made.

Uber drivers run a companion version of the smartphone app that Uber customers use. This app allows them to bid on pickups, but does not reveal the location of any of the limousines around them, competing for the same business. Uber’s drivers have less information than Uber’s customers. As a consequence, limousines tend to cluster, because drivers don’t know that they’re all converging on the same small – and presumably lucrative – area.

My driver Charles has a solution for this dilemma: he owns two mobiles, and runs both Uber apps. The driver app delivers pickup requests, while the customer app reveals the locations of any limousines nearby. “One evening I came into the city,” Charles reports, “and there were four limousines within a block.” Knowing this, Charles moved on, finding another, under-served area of the city, and got plenty of work.

Uber may not want its drivers to know about the location of other drivers, but it wants to reveal that information to its customers, so drivers simply poke holes in the wall that separate the two sides, peering through, and learning where to position themselves for greatest profit. The drivers use all information on offer – from every source – to give themselves the greatest advantage.

Charles says he’s one of the few Uber drivers using his smartphone to give him the inside track with a degree of omnipresence. It’s a technique new to him, and he doesn’t say whether he thought it up himself, or if he copied it from another driver. Either way, as Charles’ success becomes more visible, his peers, watching what he does, will copy his keys to success. What he knows will be replicated throughout the fleet of drivers until this exceptional behavior becomes pervasive and normal.

Soon, Uber will either need to provide drivers with all of the information drivers provide to Uber, or every Uber driver will use two mobiles, one for orders, and another for omnipresence. As drivers learn more about one another, they learn how to avoid economically damaging behaviors, such as clusters. The drivers self-organize, spacing themselves throughout an area in a way which generates the greatest economic advantage for each individual. They will act as a unit – as if they all answered to a common mind – although they have no central command, accept no controlling influence, and simply work to maximize their own financial interests. This emergent behavior – seen first along the Kerala coast – is the inevitable consequence of connectivity.

The information flows of connectivity move back and forth, never just in one direction, looping through us, out into the world, and back again. At every step, this information, transformed by the individuals it passes through, also transforms those individuals. “All knowing is doing, and all doing, knowing.” To connect is to know, to know is to do, and doing carries with it the opportunity to connect.

This never stops, nor ever slows.