Breaking Smart: How Software is Eating the World

by Venkatesh G. Rao

Science fiction writer Douglas Adams reduced the phenomenon to a set of three sardonic rules from the point of view of users of technology: Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

As consumers, we experience this kind of evolution as what Buckminster Fuller called ephemeralization: the seemingly magical ability of technology to do more and more with less and less.

Innovation can in fact be defined as ongoing moral progress achieved by driving directly towards the regimes of greatest moral ambiguity, where our collective demons lurk.

Marshall McLuhan described in terms of a rear-view mirror effect: “we see the world through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.”

Our aesthetic and moral sensibilities are oriented by default towards romanticized memories of paradises lost. Indeed, this is the only way we can enter the future. Our constantly pastoralizing view of the world, grounded in the past, is the only one we have. The future, glimpsed only through a small rear-view mirror, is necessarily framed by the past.

Even when there are no humans involved, problem-solving on this planet-scale computer almost necessarily involves social mechanisms. Whatever the mix of humans, software and robots involved, solutions tend to involve the same “social” design elements: real-time information streams, dynamically evolving patterns of trust, fluid identities, rapidly negotiated collaborations, unexpected emergent problem decompositions, efficiently allocated intelligence, and frictionless financial transactions.

What makes this a problem-solving mechanism is diversity of individual perspectives coupled with the law of large numbers (the statistical idea that rare events can become highly probable if there are enough trials going on). If an increasing number of highly diverse individuals operate this way, the chances of any given problem getting solved via a serendipitous new idea slowly rises. This is the luck of networks. Serendipitous solutions are not just cheaper than goal-directed ones.

Where resources cannot stream freely to accelerate serendipity, they cannot solve problems through engineered luck, or create surplus wealth. The result is growing inequality between networked and geographic worlds.

On the cusp of the first Internet boom, the landscape of organizations that defines the geographic world was already in deep trouble. As Giles Deleuze noted around 1992:1 We are in a generalized crisis in relation to all environments of enclosure — prison, hospital, factory, school, family…The administrations in charge never cease announcing supposedly necessary reforms…But everyone knows these environments are finished, whatever the length of their expiration periods. It’s only a matter of administering their last rites and of keeping people employed until the installation of new forces knocking at the door. The “crisis in environments of enclosure” is a natural terminal state for the geographic world. When every shared societal resource has been claimed by a few as an eternal and inalienable right, and secured behind regulated boundaries, the only way to gain something is to deprive somebody else of it through ideology-driven conflict.

First, people and ideas were increasingly free in the sense of no longer being considered “property” to be bought and sold like beer by others. Second, people and ideas became increasingly free in the sense of not being restricted to a single purpose. They could potentially play any role they were capable of fulfilling. For people, this second kind of freedom is usually understood in terms of specific rights such as freedom of speech, freedom of association and assembly, and freedom of religion. What is common to all these specific freedoms is that they represent freedom from the constraints imposed by authoritarian goals.

Authoritarian leaders, used to relying on coercion and policed boundaries, find it increasingly hard to enforce their priorities on others in such a world.