More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
The more data we capture, the more data we generate upon it. This metadata is growing even faster than the underlying information and is almost unlimited in its scale.
Since bits want to duplicate, replicate, and be linked, there’s no stopping the explosion of information and the science fiction levels of tracking.
Or could we construct a mutual, transparent kind of “coveillance” that involves watching the watchers?
We tend to be uncomfortable being tracked today because we don’t know much about who is watching us. We don’t know what they know. We have no say in how the information is used. They are not accountable to correct it. They are filming us but we can’t film them. And the benefits for being watched are murky and concealed. The relationship is unbalanced and asymmetrical.
Ubiquitous surveillance is inevitable. Since we cannot stop the system from tracking, we can only make the relationships more symmetrical. It’s a way of civilizing coveillance.
In a coveillant society a sense of entitlement can emerge: Every person has a human right to access, and a right to benefit from, the data about themselves. But every right requires a duty, so every person has a human duty to respect the integrity of information, to share it responsibly, and to be watched by the watched.
If today’s social media has taught us anything about ourselves as a species, it is that the human impulse to share overwhelms the human impulse for privacy.
Put it this way: For sure cops will videotape citizens. That’s okay as long as citizens can videotape cops, and can get access to the cops’ videos, and share them to keep the more powerful accountable. That’s not the end of the story, but it’s how a transparent society has to start.
For the civilized world, anonymity is like a rare earth metal. In larger doses these heavy metals are some of the most toxic substances known to a life. They
Anonymity enables the occasional whistle-blower and can protect the persecuted fringe and political outcasts. But if anonymity is present in any significant quantity, it will poison the system.
A lack of responsibility unleashes the worst in us.
Everything else in the realm of data is headed to infinity. Or at least astronomical quantities.
Large quantities of something can transform the nature of those somethings. More is different.
Call this difference zillionics. A zillion neurons give you a smartness a million won’t. A zillion data points will give you insight that a mere hundred thousand don’t. A zillion chips connected to the internet create a pulsating, vibrating unity that 10 million chips can’t.
Bits can be arranged into complicated structures just as atoms are arranged into molecules. By raising the level of complexity, we elevate bits from data to information to knowledge. The full power of data lies in the many ways it can be reordered, restructured, reused, reimagined, remixed. Bits want to be linked; the more relationships a bit of data can join, the more powerful it gets.
To exploit the full potential of the zillionbytes of data that we are harvesting and creating, we need to be able to arrange bits in ways that machines and artificial intelligences can understand.
Entirely new industries have sprung up in the last two decades based on the idea of unbundling.
Over the next 30 years, the great work will be parsing all the information we track and create—all the information of business, education, entertainment, science, sport, and social relations—into their most primeval elements. The scale of this undertaking requires massive cycles of cognition. Data scientists call this stage “machine readable” information, because it is AIs and not humans who will do this work in the zillions. When you hear a term like “big data,” this is what it is about.
Out of this new chemistry of information will arise thousands of new compounds and informational building materials. Ceaseless tracking is inevitable, but it is only the start.
With the right tools, it turns out the collaborative community can outpace the same number of ambitious individuals competing.
It has always been clear that collectives amplify power—that is what cities and civilizations are—but what’s been the big surprise for me is how minimal the tools and oversight that are needed.
Once you confront the fact that it works, you have to shift your expectation of what else there may be that is impossible in theory but might work in practice.
Wikipedia has taught me to believe in the impossible more often. In the past several decades I’ve had to accept other ideas that I formerly thought were impossibilities but that later turned out to be good practical ideas.
These supposed impossibilities keep happening with increased frequency.
As far as I can tell, the impossible things happening now are in every case due to the emergence of a new level of organization that did not exist before. These incredible eruptions are the result of large-scale collaboration, and massive real-time social interacting, which in turn are enabled by omnipresent instant connection between billions of people at a planetary scale.
This is the first time on this planet that we’ve tied a billion people together in immediate syncopation, just as Facebook has done. From this new societal organization, new behaviors emerge that were impossible at the lower level.
The genius of eBay was its invention of cheap, easy, and quick reputation status. Strangers could sell to strangers at a great distance
That lowly innovation opened up a new kind of higher-level coordination that permitted a new kind of exchange (remote purchasing among strangers) that was impossible before.
The majority of the most amazing communication inventions that are possible have not been invented yet. We are also just in the infancy of being able to invent institutions at a truly global scale. When we weave ourselves together into a global real-time society, former impossibilities will really start to erupt into reality.
It is only necessary that we connect everyone to everyone else—and to everything else—all the time and create new things together.
think we’ll be surprised by how many of the things we assumed were “natural” for humans are not really natural at all. It might be fairer to say that what is natural for a tribe of mildly connected humans will not be natural for a planet of intensely connected humans.
Criminals are some of the most creative innovators in the world. And crap constitutes 80 percent of everything. But importantly, these negative forms follow exactly the same general trends I’ve been outlining for the positive. The negative, too, will become increasingly cognified, remixed, and filtered.
Both virtue and vice are subject to the same great becoming and flowing forces.
every harmful invention also provides a niche to create a brand-new never-seen-before good.
This expansion of choices (including the choice to do harm) is an increase in freedom—and this increase in freedoms and choices and opportunities is the foundation of our progress, of our humanity, and of our individual happiness.
Much more important, as individuals we behave differently in collectives.
Connected, in real time, in multiple ways, at an increasingly global scale, in matters large and small, with our permission, we will operate at a new level, and we won’t cease surprising ourselves with impossible achievements. The impossibility of Wikipedia will quietly recede into outright obviousness.
In addition to hard-to-believe emergent phenomenon, we are headed to a world where the improbable is the new normal.
The internet is like a lens that focuses the extraordinary into a beam, and that beam has become our illumination.
I think there is already evidence that this ocean of extraordinariness is inspiring and daring ordinary folks to try something extraordinary.
The bad news may be that this insatiable appetite for super-superlatives leads to dissatisfaction with anything ordinary.
Soon only the most extraordinary moments of 6 billion citizens will fill our streams. So henceforth rather than be surrounded by ordinariness we’ll float in extraordinariness—as it becomes mundane.
There is a dreamlike quality to this state of improbability. Certainty itself is no longer as certain as it once was.
For every accepted piece of knowledge I come across, there is, within easy reach, a challenge to the fact. Every fact has its antifact.
Ironically, in an age of instant global connection, my certainty about anything has decreased. Rather than receiving truth from an authority, I am reduced to assembling my own certainty from the liquid stream of facts flowing through the web.
That means that in general I have to constantly question what I think I know.
the internet also blurs the difference between my serious thoughts and my playful thoughts, or to put it more simply: I no longer can tell when I am working and when I am playing online.
Picture the thousands of millions of people online at this very minute. To my eye they are not wasting time with silly associative links, but are engaged in a more productive way of thinking—getting instant answers, researching, responding, daydreaming, browsing, being confronted with something very different, writing down their own thoughts, posting their opinions, even if small.
Fluidity and interactivity also allow us to instantly divert more attention to works that are far more complex, bigger, and more complicated than ever before.
But the most important way these new technologies are changing how we think is that they have become one thing.
