Hey, Borough, I can hear you. Can everyone hear me? I hear you. Okay, cool. Sorry, for some reason, my bedroom, just this past week, like, my phone specifically stopped receiving Wi-Fi in it, and I don't know what's going on with that. So whenever I came back here, it disconnected as I was trying to set it up. So sorry about that. Just a minute, I'm going to finish getting set up, and then we'll get going. Okay, good evening, everyone. It wouldn't be Twitter Spaces without some sort of technical mishap. So it's just the nature of things, I guess. Normally, I start by giving this kind of like long psychoanalytic account, or rather, I should say, I'm trying to build up an account of human being, or what you could really call anthropogenesis, the process by which humans become human. Because I, and I think this is starting to come up more and more in the readings, there's a question about how the internet and new technologies are impacting and reconfiguring human nature. So this this approach that I've given with psychoanalysis, I mean, it's a very niche approach to to the human being. But I think that it has a lot to offer. And whenever we look at this, Smith text, he mentions the problem of attention on the internet and the attention economy. And I think that that's a prime, prime site for thinking psychoanalytically. So that said, how did everyone find the readings, if you're able to get to them? If not, that's also totally fine. I'll send out speaking invitations to everyone. Okay, those should be those should be sent. I got through them. There was two readings, one on the world brain. And the sudden acceleration. So I got through half of the larger one, which is sudden acceleration. The world brain. I like that I found it interesting. It's like it's like 2020. Like in terms of like he had this idea of like, I guess Wikipedia, like like an abstraction of what it would be like. And like, he had a very like optimistic view over that. Like it wouldn't like, I guess, like, bring like enlightenment to everyone. But that doesn't seem to be the case where everyone has access to like, the entirety of like human knowledge at the on their phone. People are either like, too busy participating in the attention economy, just scrolling on Twitter. Like participating in like, political arguments that don't really go anywhere. Yes, and there's also I mean, there's there's a real factor, I think, of enjoyment in using the internet in that way. Both Smith and Petzold, I think, mentioned that like, you know, sometimes you just want to go online and be vicious towards random strangers who you disagree with. And that's a that's a source of like, use. That's that's a use case of the internet is this in placeable aggressivity, as it were. So that's a yeah, that's that's question about the internet brings together all of this information. But does it actually make it useful? Is that the same thing as being usable, or navigable? And what needs to be set up in order for that to happen? You said you got partway through the Smith. Do you remember where you where you stopped? I think that for myself that there's a there's a midway through that article, there's this thing on attention. There's a big segment on attention. And that for me was a little bit of rough going. But yeah, where did you Yeah, it lost. Okay. Okay. Yeah, that's yeah. Generally, whenever I'm reading these texts, like there's there will be sections where it's like, I'm half asleep. And that, you know, like, it goes on and on for like several paragraphs, and I have no idea what's happening. And then there will be a sentence that catches me and wakes me back up. And I'm like, Oh, yeah, that makes sense. I agree with that. And sometimes reading these like theory text or philosophy texts, that's just what you have to do. And that's partly to do with the fact that academic work or scholarship this is always in dialogue. These authors are citing each other. They're arguing with each other and bickering, sometimes not even explicitly. And so it's a little bit like walking into a party and being expected to like know who all the people are and what what all of their backstories are. Yeah, so for me, philosophy has this like circular methodology. You have to at some point just be willing to get out into the party, break the ice, do whatever and look foolish doing so. And just be aware that in time you will, if you persist, if you keep reading through it, you'll be able to come back to those parties, those conversations with a better sense of them. So I don't know how it is in other disciplines, but certainly in philosophy, I would say that true reading is always rereading. It's always going back and seeing. And this is also a kind of psychoanalytic argument. On your first reading, you're only going to pick up what you already understand. So you'll only see what you already see. Rereading allows you to go back to a text and find it's sort of strange elements or it's those points where just quickly glossed over it. And that's always for me a very rewarding experience to have happen. But yeah, I know that that. So what I'm saying is whenever you're reading these texts, whenever it gets that way, you can just be like, yeah, I have no idea what that is and move on if you have the time. Yeah, I could see like definitely there's a degree of like making a checklist just to say that you're qualified to even like on this discussion and create a book. And it's interesting that like the book describing the attention economy is losing people's attention. Yes, yes. And Smith's argument. It's about attention, but he does some really interesting things. And so we can get to that. But yeah, that for me was a hard section in the book. And I don't know if it's because... my guess is that it's so condensed. Like he's responding to so many other people. He's talking about like the history of modern aesthetics. And like there's so much that's condensed in that section that I think it's like, if you aren't already familiar with it, it just it's like watching a train pass by. Okay, any anything else? I guess on the world brain, just I love that he had like the abstractions, like he had the abstraction like correct. And I guess the other like part that didn't play out was moderating like this, this world is like, like Wikipedia, like there's a lot of good things about Wikipedia. And it's definitely like a very useful like reference. But then like moderation is an issue. Like there's like sections that I'm told that are like really great, like math and science, like that are like very accurate. But then there's more, I guess, like contentious issues where there's like these like, I guess, like moderators who just have these positions. And it's hard to like, is I've been worth like attempting editing certain things? And I envy and I think had talked about Wikipedia several several weeks or months ago, now. And he shared an article with me that I'm not remembering. But it basically observed that Wikipedia has another problem with Wikipedia anyway, is that most of its sources and citations now go to mainstream journalism rather than to academic works or data studies or anything like that. And so there's a real danger that it is simply reproducing sort of mainstream narrative content. And that, I mean, journalists don't always get everything right, especially on technical issues. Current events are constantly changing and all of that. So yeah, Petzl doesn't really at all talk about that. He has some nod to the Wikipedia guy at the very end. He's like, well, thank goodness for him. Wikipedia is so great. But yeah, he definitely leaves that of moderation untouched. Yeah, just it seems like good intentions of like secondary sources, having secondary sources. But I guess just the way it plays out. It's there's too many cooks in the kitchen. And, you know, these, you know, those journalists, they have to a long lecture on psychoanalysis. Hooray. But that's just because in the coming weeks, we'll be reading actual Lacanian text. And that will be when I'll return to that. So this today, we'll just focus on the text, the readings. And we'll Yeah, just go ahead and dive right into that. So Petzold, I wanted to point out that on page 453, he, I appreciated Petzold's world brain text, because I'm not a, I have no like software engineering or technical background like this. So for me, it really helped to unpack just like what is HTTP? How does it interact with TCP IP? What is a modem? All of things I thought were nicely pulled out and addressed. But on 453, he says digital information is encoded in fiber optic cables by pulsing the light. The light is effectively turned off and on very, very quickly, where off is zero and on is one. And, you know, even for all of this technical sophistication and all of these acronyms that the internet has accrued, it's still very much kind of a smoke signal system. But one that becomes increasingly complicated. And so I was thinking about that in terms of the 19th century telecommunications devices that we had looked at, you know, flags and windmills or whatever it was that they had constructed. And I was struck that it wasn't all, that there doesn't seem to be as much change in that sense, as the new technologies might claim. Um, so on the next page, Petzold says the internet has become the pinnacle and culmination of the computer revolution. And here I just have a big open question for anyone. Do you agree? Is computing or is our computers mostly about whatever the internet is about, this world brain? So maybe another way to frame this question. He says that the internet is the pinnacle and culmination of computing, of the computer revolution. The internet, however, is mostly a network for communication, let's say. And then computers are about computing. This is actually a long-standing philosophical debate. Is language just a form of calculation, of raciocination? Or is there something more to it? Is there some spiritual dimension to communication that computation doesn't achieve or doesn't quite reach? So yeah, maybe my question is, do you think that computation is communication? Are they the same? Are they different? And if they are different, where do you think the distinction lies? I'm not sure where to start with that, but what he did say was before internet was used for communication, it was used for business purposes and scientific computation. Yep. Yes, he gives that history. I guess it's ARPANET before it became the internet. Thinking about that history that he gives of the technology, it kind of goes back to what we saw in Wendy Chun's argument last week, where she says that cyberspace isn't like film or cinema. It isn't like radio. All of these other forms of media tell you either what they are, what they're based on, something like that. Cyberspace and the internet, however, tell you in some sense nothing about what they are. And she traces the origin of the term cyberspace to fiction, to science fiction, William Gibson, Mill Stevenson, and these others. And here as well in Petzold, we start with the origin of the internet in this kind of fictional space. We start with H.G. Wells, and then he goes on to these other authors, the thinkers of hypertext, and so on. Is there anything to that, to an origin in a fictional space rather than in the real technology that makes it possible? Just myself, I may be struggling with this question because just from a technical background, I kind of see the full stack from the communication down to the ones and zeros. So maybe there isn't a black box or magic that I'm missing in the question. So the question, I guess, that I want to be asking is about... or the point I want to be making is that the origin of the internet or this telecommunication system, it seems to keep being... our authors keep pointing us to this notion that it came out of fiction, it came out of fantasy, rather than out of some sort of well-organized or intentional technological development sequence, and moreover that those technological development sequences were heavily informed by literary and fictional works, including terms cyberspace, hypertext, and so forth. So for me, there's something about the internet that even in its name, even in this term of internet or cyberspace, already enmeshes us in a world that isn't simply real. There's something already fictional or fantastic about this cyberspace that we occupy. Petzold on 457, he says, as more and more processing and data storage moves to servers, these servers have become collectively known as the cloud. As more and more of the personal users are stored on the cloud, the actual computers that people use to create or access that data becomes less important. The cloud makes the computing experience user-centric, rather than hardware-centric. So that again is going somewhat to this, the Wendy Chun article that we read last week. There she says that she's going to describe cyberspace the internet to us, not in terms of its technical reality, but she's primarily concerned with its phenomenological reality or the reality as users experience it. So this concern, I think, with how users experience the internet, at the time Wendy Chun is writing it, in 2005, 2008, whenever it is, this is sort of still prior to Web2. And you could almost say, I think, that Web2 has accelerated that tendency to, as Petzold says, make the experience user-centric, rather than hardware-centric. And the question I have for that is, what's gained, what's lost in this move from a hardware-centric to a user-centric internet? And I know that Smith gives us some answers with attention, but if you have anything, if you want to relate it back to Chun or to something else, yeah. Do you feel like anything is lost in moving from hardware-centric to user-centric? I know that in Cosmos, people are always saying, you know, nobody should have to know what a smart contract is, nobody should have to know what a wallet is, we just want it to be easy to use. Is that always a good thing? Should people have to know something about the technology? In terms of moving from hardware to user, maybe this is just the engineer in me, but also speaking, but I generally see it a good thing. It's democratizing access to technology. Instead of having to capitalize mainframes or servers, you could access it, like pay-per-use, and it's much more accessible to startups or individuals. I think that that's the argument that is often made in crypto space as well, is that by turning it into a user-centric thing, rather than forcing people to do all of this, that it democratizes crypto further. I think that one of the arguments that Wendy Chen makes is that that democratization process isn't as transparently democratic as it appears, in part because the rhetoric of users indicates that when you're online, you're this empowered agent, you control what you see, control all of that, and that rhetoric obscures the much larger degree to which when you're online, you're used by the services that you use. They're harvesting your data, they're marketing to you, and this bidirectionality of the internet gets somewhat erased in the process. Do you, poor or anyone, from an engineering perspective, think that blockchain technologies make that bidirectionality more transparent, or do they solve some of the problems with that tendency of internet companies to use their users? Yeah, and blockchain, it doesn't inherently solve it. I think people get used all the time. Either they say, like, exit liquidity, they get rugged, and retail can't have a really rough time in blockchain. Do you think that the same practices and tendencies towards data harvesting are possible on blockchain? It does happen, because it's a transparent public ledger. Like, even if you're pseudonymous, like how Bitcoin is, there's always, like, breadcrumbs that you can be tracked with. And I know that also... And even on, sorry, the privacy-centered blockchains like Monero or Secret, there's always, like, off-ramps where, if you want to exchange into something more liquid, you could just be tracked there instead. And I think this also comes up in the question of airdrops, which are so important in Cosmos. It seems like there's a kind of crisis of how to get that data and how to make sense of the data. But I don't know... Yeah, but I'm interested to see if that data being public and something that everyone can look at, in some sense, resolves the objections to the Internet as this, like, black box, which presents itself as a free, open space. Anyone can do anything. But in fact, behind the curtain, there are very sophisticated algorithms tracking you and basically creating profiles for you for marketing and other purposes. So, again, on 457, Petzold says, but equally obvious, and, Poirot, you mentioned this, is that providing this access to the world's records and data doesn't automatically propel civilization into a golden age. People tend now to be more overwhelmed than ever by the quantity of information available rather than feeling that they can manage it. If you... I don't know exactly where it happens in the Smith reading, but he does mention... He has this keen observation that the feeling of information overload has been with us, that is with humans as a species, since at least the technological revolution of the printing press. Printing is itself a kind of lo-fi or high latency version of the Internet. In that regards, yet even with that high latency, people found it destabilizing to cultural values, to political orders, and so forth. So, from this last quote on Petzold, I have a couple of questions. So, does information overload make sense of our culture's tendency toward political apathy? Are you convinced that that's what's caused our malaise with respect to cultural and political issues to such a degree as one might say that that's the case with our culture? Or more personally, do you feel overwhelmed by the information on the Internet? Um, I feel like even if you have critical thinking skills, not everyone has them, so there's a telephone game where you have to have the other person be receptive to critical thinking. And then you could put a person into a critical thinking course, but they won't think critically also. And then there's people who will either consciously or subconsciously, like sort of a sociopathic way, like ignore like spots where they should be critical thinkers just to get ahead. So critical thinking isn't quite a panacea. I think one of the ways that information overload plays into, like with the Internet, when I'm alone researching stuff, I don't really feel overloaded. Sometimes I do, but the most part I don't. But it's that there's so much information out there that the slice of it that I get is probably going to be very different from the slice that any other person gets. And there's more or less compatibility in terms of communicating with another person. If you have different assumptions going into it, and the Internet enables us to develop diverging assumptions and affirm them, I guess, like get really strongly, you know, dig our feet in the sand, that kind of thing. And I think there's an overload in that, but it isn't... like it is from the information on the Internet, but it isn't direct. It's kind of a second order effect of it. Yeah, and I'm interested in this question of information because it's also a condition which seems to describe our sensory motor nervous system, as it were. There is a sense in which we are overwhelmed by sensation. If you paid attention, as it were, to everything happening around you, you wouldn't be able to function. You have to have some form of selective attention to know that, you know, the leaf moving on the ground isn't a rat that's going to bite me. And you need to be able to do that rapidly in some ways in order to function. And so there's a... for me, this question of information overload goes to what it means to be a human being, because we're always making these selections in our attentional awareness of the world. It isn't just that the Internet overloads us, it's that reality itself overloads us. And so it may not be so far removed, as let's say the Luddites or technological doomsayers would have us believe. Humanity for a long time has been overwhelmed by the information that it is subject to. And that it's constitutive of human being. So this leads kind of into my second question, which is should the history of computers, should the history of the Internet or of technology more generally, should it push back past digital devices or electricity to include book binding, printmaking, and even, let's say, oral traditions of memory? I think that one issue is that I've read various histories of the computer, histories of the Internet, and basically none of them agree. Rather, if they agree, it's to the extent that they say, no idea where this began. On the other hand, there is always this effort to kind of carve out or to specify and say the Internet begins with this, with this, with that. Is there somewhere that you would draw a line and say, like, this is where we should begin thinking about computers, the Internet, whatever? I think it goes back to language, like you were saying, because... I'm sorry, I just had a blank one moment. Yeah, board games. Someone used an example of a board game is like a distributed computing network where the game takes place in the minds of the players, and they have to maintain consensus for the state of the game to go on. And it's like that isn't a computer, obviously, in the sense that, you know, it's not, you know, what you have on your desk. But it is the same kind of coordination in that you have a domain of interactions that governs the state, like how the system progresses. Um, that is very interesting. And I have a note that I will try to find, give me just a moment, specifically on this question of gaming, because I think that it's a non-trivial part of what it means to be a computer and the question of computation. So yeah, give me just a moment to find that. I like this example. I find it interesting, like it, you can have like, different levels of understanding of the game, like you could have your like, house rules, which are like oral traditions, or you can follow like the games like instruction manual. And even that's somewhat subject to interpretation, I've had lots of arguments over magic, the gathering rules, people not playing the game, right? And then, like, then you can have like, digital versions of those games where, like, the rules are enforced automatically through like a rule engine, and there's less like subjectivity. And they're obviously like, there's different ways of playing the game, like people still play in person, like magic, the gathering. So do you do you regard a game system as a kind of computer in that way? You can, you can say it's a state machine, where there's like, I guess these nodes, and then there's like pathways between the nodes. Blockchains like function, I guess, similarly, there's like a state machine at the core of it. And then, like each each block, there's like a transition event that brings you from one node to another. Like, you could think of like state machines as like a source of truth. I think that it cut out, and I only caught that last bit, there's a gap, do you mind? I heard state machines are a source of truth. Um, yeah, games, you can like, essentially say there's like a state machine where like, you have like these nodes of what the current state of the game is, and you want to get to the next state. So you have these like events, like you play a card, and then you kind of resolve the actions, and then you kind of reach the next node where there's a source of truth of the state. And then you could proceed further based on the actions available at that node. So, and then blockchains also function similarly, where block to block, you're at a node, and then to transition to another block, there's like an event which like dictates the sequence to the next node. So I found my my note on this, this precise or related issue, so I'll share that. Um, this is from several years ago. I was wondering about whether games are commodities or technologies. And if you've read Marx, you know that he distinguishes commodities from technologies. He says the commodity fetishizes use value for exchange value. But what seems to be less well known or less well, less often remarked, is that Marx's notion of technology as reifying, and reification is simply Marx's term for making something visible, making it objective. For example, the the labor of someone gets reified into the price of a commodity. So Marx's notion of technology as reifying things, he says the technology reifies the conditions of the mind or thinking. Which is why technology has the admirable benefit of rendering superfluous individual labor. If you if you think about Marx's technology as linked to a to a potential or public space, it makes in some sense technology, or let's call it a game, precisely makes the rules of that space open to everyone. I'm going to read a quote here. It says, be it the teddy bear that the child refuses to give up, or the cards of the poker player, the masks used in a game of charades or a complicated crossword puzzle, the objects of play make visible the potential space between mind and world. This is a subjective but external space, public but not yet social, insofar as we call social the interactions among people possessing a strongly defined identity. In effect, games and objects of play to some degree strip people of their identities, or better they suspend their identities, and allow them to act or to operate according to the rules of whatever technology or game is there. This is slightly related, I think, to the way that theater is said to suspend disbelief. Theater, of course, produces plays. So in short, you play a game against someone or against others, yes, but it's still people following certain rules. So you're not just randomly encountering others and engaging them, as you would in a social space. This is rather a public space, because everyone is thinking through a public system or machine, a technology that puts them in touch with the fundamentally public, yet subjective, nature of intelligence. I hope that made some sense. Again, a third question on this pet sold, although nobody has to answer it. He mentions, just kind of in passing, that the transition to the internet and this global encyclopedia world brain may entail losses in human memory. And this is an argument that Smith brings up. But it's even in Plato, if you read the Phaedo dialogue, there's a whole... that dialogue is wild. But there's a section in there where he talks about writing versus speech, and Plato is strongly, or rather Socrates, is strongly opposed to writing, because he says writing diminishes the human spirit, it diminishes the art of memory, and it turns people into these sort of index searchers, if you will. So this is, again, just a broad sort of personal question, but does that seem true or false to you? Is writing, including, let's say, the record keeping of blockchain, an aid to memory, or does it interfere or even sabotage our memorial capacities? Just to give a personal answer to a personal question. For me, when I write an essay, I can promptly forget everything that I've written after that. It's as though it's containerized and pushed off somewhere. It's externalized, it belongs somewhere, now it's no longer just bouncing around in my head. So I'm just wondering if that's also anyone else's experience, or if I'm subject to some sort of philosophical curse. I could definitely relate to that. Last night, I was trying to solve this programming problem of CMQ sockets and learning how to multi-thread them. And I finally solved it, and then I just had to get the idea out of my head, and I stayed up until 6 a.m. to do it, and then I could go to sleep. And now that it's in the file, and I know that's correct, and I actually understand it, like so I can, you know, reference this. I wonder if it, would you connect that to, like Wendy Chen last week says, that rather than users of the internet, we should really think of people on the internet as gawkers. Would you, do you read that as, maybe rather than gawkers, I would say again, or indexers? Do you feel like that's what's happening with technology? I get the feeling that AI also kind of does this, right? Like, I don't need to know all of the details in a book if I can just ask AI, chat GPT, to tell me, whatever. Yeah, go ahead. Well, our cognitive processes, they're so limited and like relatively primitive compared to like, because just because of the entropy of it, like we could like, lose our thoughts, we lose our memories. We don't really access things when we want, like ADHD is just like your front and like rear brain, it's just your executive control isn't accessing what you know at the right time. But these computers are capable of doing it. So it's just another tool in the toolbox. And humans are, I guess, tools, tool users. Yeah, I think that, yeah, the Smith reading, he talks about gadget being, as being something like our originary condition as a species. I was just going to say that some of this like, sort of doom, negative or pessimistic approach to technology reminds me a bit of the Disney Pixar film Wall-E. Sorry, in this, yeah, this question about on the one hand, technology seems to free us, to make us free. But does it really free us or into what kind of freedom does it permit access? Just to close out here on Petzold, as we get over to Smith, he says in the sense that the internet represents a sampling of many different types of people and personalities and beliefs and interest, it is certainly some sort of world brain. But it is definitely not the common interpretation of reality that Wells desired. Almost as prevalent as authentic knowledge are unnerving manifestations of crank science and conspiracy theories. This is a point for me to make about psychoanalysis, but the common of reality, the common interpretation of reality or so-called common sense, is it really so common after all? Or doesn't the internet show us that what common to people is not some predicate, some substance or property they possess, but something like antagonism, aggressivity, or dissensus as such. I think that's a very important point because so many approaches to, let's say, communism, but also just to thinking about the commons from democratic perspective or socialist or whatever, tend to convert the common into a specifiable property. It's something we all share. We're all democrats here. We're all whatever here. In that sense, it's like a blanket. The common is a blanket in which everyone can snuggle up. There is a competing notion of the common, however, which is not that it's a blanket, but what's common to us but simply a blank. We all have to fill in that blank. We all have to think through that blank and to share that thinking with others. That is what life in common means. And so the collapse of that blank space into a blanket, which covers everything and smothers everything in utopian sort of temptation or a dystopian temptation that critical thinking has to resist. But what's common to us is precisely antagonism or difference. And I think that this is what the internet has shown us with all of those crank science and conspiracy theories and so forth. Whatever status you want to... I think even the notions of crank science and conspiracy theory are contested categories. Different people will tell you different things are crank science and conspiracy theory. So okay, so Petzold gave us this like very... Hello? I'm getting ripped.