Early November last year, I watched a YouTube video by Luke Smith (a somewhat controversial technology-YouTuber) in which he briefly discussed the recent election. While it should be quite clear that I don’t agree with all of his world views or political leanings (in this video alone he coyly presents the idea of balkanising the US into ethnostates as one possible outcome from his suggestions), it just so happened to be this particular video that spurred me into typing out some ideas that by then I had been mulling over for some time. I also got a response that caused me to write yet another comment as a retort. This post consists of all three of these comments.
I keep thinking back to my time in uni studying numerical physics, when we looked at percolation problems, forest fire / epidemic models, and did numerical experiments to see how things would develop and depend on specific parameters. One thing that stuck out to me was how sensitive the behaviour of our simulations was to how well-connected things were. Once we increased the radius that a fire could spread from tree to tree, or let people have more friends geographically further away, everything would tend towards catastrophe in a hurry.
Our civilization and even we as a species developed with geographical proximity being a limiting factor in communication, social life, entertainment, ones perception of normality, and so on and so on. With the recent development in roads and especially the internet, we as a society have taken our social life and gone from a graph that is tightly connected at short distances and hardly connected at all at greater ones, and flipped that entirely on its head. We know our closest neighbours less and less, and by contrast are in some cases even more connected with people on the other side of the world.
To give a specific example, you could easily imagine two people on opposite sides of the world sharing the same twitter feed, reddit page, read the same news, watch the same YT channels, just so long as they share the same political belief / moral values. And conversely, two people living door-to-door who disagree politically/morally/religiously may be exposed to entirely different versions of reality online.
Watching the world today feels like one of those simulations I did after radically changing the connectedness of my model. I fear we either get more locally oriented as a species or face catastrophe.
That’s assuming that each interaction is negative. Of course if a tree is on fire, the further it can spread the fire the worse it is. But if the tree helps the trees near it grow instead, the bigger the radius the stronger the forest will grow. The problem isn’t how big the circle is, the problem is how positive each interaction is on average.
- jetison333
I’m making no such assumption. It is unfortunate that both of my examples are of destructive processes, but really, my point is about large dynamical systems in general and how their behaviour typically changes when their parameters are altered. In this case I’m merely pointing out a recent radical change in the social fabric of the world, and how that tends to result in mathematical catastrophees.
Besides, there is no single defining type of interaction between humans that can be rated as either purely positive or negative. And even if there were, such an interaction at scale in our extensive social connectedness would certainly exhibit unpredictable emergent properties, never encountered before by humanity. In the short term, it is hard to imagine stability with such a change.
What is a social forest fire? No one really knows, since until recently our trees have been too far apart.
What would be the opposite of a social forest fire, or a positive interaction if you will? This also is yet to be determined.
I have hinted at one potential fire that we are seeing though. As people have been freed from geographical limitations on with whom they may discuss politics, people at the fringes have a tendency to solidify they position, rather than softening and falling within a range forced upon them by their local political climate. As a result we see rampant tribalism, and no willingness to mediate or reach compromise. In addition, conspiracy theories are running wild, thanks to the fact that the individual village-loons have no trouble finding eachother to reinforce their beliefs, forming larger social groops and giving off an impression of legitimacy to the average citizen.
The interaction at the root of these developments is essentially communication, or the ability to find people interested in the same thing as you. Locally, such an interaction is a “positive” almost without exception. But the emergent properties that come with it at scale clearly pose a threat to the stability of society.
Unfortunately, since humans are a much more “sophisticated” species than trees, there could easily be many more “social fires” going on at the same time, overlapping, interacting or in parallel, but every single one pushing society into instability.
This topic is one I continue to think and worry about a great deal. My final facebook post made reference to some of these ideas, without explaining them too clearly. As I wrote at the end of that post too, I am sure that I will revisit this topic again, but I liked what I managed to get out in these couple of comments, and thought they would work well enough as a place to start.