Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?

by John Brockman

  The Fourth Phase of Homo sapiens

  Scott Atran

  Anthropologist, National Center for Scientific Research, Paris; author, In Gods We Trust

  I received this year’s Edge question while in Damascus, shuttling messages from Jerusalem aimed at probing possibilities for peace. And I got to thinking about how my thinking on world peace and transnational violence has been shaped by the Internet, and how the advent of the Internet has framed my view of human history and destiny.

  I’m aware that I’m living on the cusp of perhaps the third great tipping point in human history, and that this is an awesome and lucky thing to experience.

  First, I imagine myself with a small band moving out of Africa into the Fertile Crescent around 60,000 years ago, when humans mastered language and began to conquer the globe. More than half a million years ago, the Neanderthal and human branches of evolution began to split from our common ancestor Homo erectus (or perhaps Homo ergaster). Neanderthals, like H. erectus before, spread out of Africa and across Eurasia. But our ancestors, who acquired fully human body structures about 200,000 years ago, remained stuck in the savanna grasslands and scrub of first eastern and then southern Africa. Recent archaeological and DNA analyses suggest that our species may have tottered on the verge of extinction as recently as 70,000 years ago, dwindling to fewer than 2,000 souls. Then, in an almost miraculous change of fortune about 60,000 to 50,000 years ago, one or a few human bands moved out of Africa for good.

  This beginning of human wanderlust was likely stirred by global cooling and the attendant parching of the African grasslands, which led to loss of game and grain. But there is also the strong possibility, based on circumstantial evidence relating to a “cultural explosion” of human artifacts and technologies, that a mutation rewired the brain for computational efficiency. This rewiring allowed for recursion (embedding whole bundles of perceptions and thought within other bundles of perceptions and thoughts), which is an essential property of both human language (syntactic structures) and mind-reading skills (or Theory of Mind, the ability to infer other people’s thoughts and perceptions: “I know that she knows that I know that he knows that . . . ,” etc.).

  Language and mind reading, in turn, became critical to development of peculiarly human forms of thinking and communication, including planning and cooperation among anonymous strangers, imagining plausible versus fictitious pasts and futures, the counterfactuals of reason, and the supernaturals of religion. Together, language and mind reading generated both self-awareness and awareness of others. Other animals may have beliefs, but they don’t know they have them. Once humans could entertain and communicate imaginary worlds and beliefs about beliefs, they could break apart and recombine representations of the material and social world at will, with or without regard to immediate or future biological needs.

  Human societies, the great French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss argued, divide into “cold” and “hot” cultures. For most of the time that humans have walked the earth, there were only preliterate, “cold” societies, whose people conceived of nature and social time as eternally static or entirely cyclical: That is, the current order was conceived as a projection of an order that had existed since mythical times. The interpretation of the origins of the world and the development of society was rendered in mythological terms. Every element of the knowable universe would be connected in kaleidoscopic fashion to every other element in memorable stories, however arbitrary or fantastic, that could be passed down orally from generation to generation.

  A typical mythic account of the world might “explain” how nomadic patterns of residence and seasonal movement emanated from patterns perceived in the stars; how star patterns, in turn, got their shapes from the wild animals around; and how people were made to organize themselves into larger totemic societies, dividing tasks and duties according to the “natural order.”

  So I imagine myself in ancient Mesopotamia, trying to kick myself out of this cold cycle, as human history began to heat up at the dawn of writing. I try to conjure up in my mind how the seemingly unchanging and cyclical world of oral memory and myth, of frozen and eternal history, could almost all of a sudden, after tens of thousands of years of near stasis, flame forward along the Eurasian Silk Road into civilizations and world commerce, universal religions and government by law, armies and the accumulated knowledge that would one day become science.

  Direct reciprocity—“I’ll scratch your back and you scratch mine”—works well within small bands or neighborhoods, where people know one another and it would be hard to get away with cheating customers. But as societies become larger and more complex, transactions increasingly involve indirect forms of reciprocity: promises between strangers of delivery after payment, or payment after delivery. Roads, writing, money, contracts, and laws—the channels of communication and exchange that make state-level societies viable—greatly increase prospects for variety, reliability, and accountability in indirect transactions. As groups expand in size, exploiting a widening range of ecological habitats, an increasing division of productive and cognitive labor becomes both possible and preferable.

  By the time of Jesus Christ, two millennia ago, four great neighboring polities spanned Eurasia’s middle latitudes: the Roman Empire; the Parthian Empire, centered in Persia and Mesopotamia; the Kushan Empire of Central Asia and Northern India; and the Han Empire of China and Korea. The Kushan Empire had diplomatic links with the other three, and all four were linked by a network of trade routes known to posterity as the Silk Road. It’s along the Silk Road that Eurasia’s three universalist moral religions—Judaism, Zoroastrianism, and Hinduism—interacted and mutated from their respective territorial and tribal origins into the three proselytizing, globalizing religions that today vie for the soul of humanity: Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism.

  The three globalizing religions created two new concepts in human thought: individual free choice and collective humanity. People not born into these religions could, in principle, choose to belong (or remain outside), without regard to ethnicity, tribe, or territory. The mission of these religions was to extend moral salvation to all peoples, not just to a “chosen people” that would light the way for others.

  Secularized by the European Enlightenment, the great quasi- religious isms of modern history—colonialism, socialism, anarchism, fascism, communism, and democratic liberalism—harnessed industry and science to continue on a global scale the human imperative of “cooperate to compete.”

  Today I see myself riding on the information highway of cyberspace as if I were on a light beam, casting off such previous human technologies and relationships as books and nation states. If people could fly like Superman, they wouldn’t need cars or elevators—and if they can electronically surf for knowledge and relationships, then physical libraries and borders become irrelevant.

  I try to imagine what the world will be like with social relationships unbounded by space, and the spiraling fusion of memory and knowledge in a global social brain that anyone can access. Future generations will be able to bind with their ancestors in various ways, because they can see and hear them as they actually were and not just in isolated texts, paintings, and photographs. And the multiple pathways and redundancies in knowledge networks will enable even the simpleminded to approach the creations of genius.

  Truth be told, I can no more foresee the actual forms of knowledge, technology, and society that are likely to result than an ancient Bushman or Sumerian could foresee how people could split the atom, traipse on the moon, crack the genetic code, or meet for life in cyberspace. (And anyone who says he can is just blowing smoke in your face.)

  But I am reasonably sure that whatever new forms arise, they will have to accommodate fundamental aspects of human nature that have hardly changed since the Stone Age: love, hate, jealousy, guilt, contempt, pride, loyalty, friendship, rivalry, the thrill of risk and adventure, the joy of accomplishment and victory, the desire for esteem and glory, the search for
pattern and cause in everything that touches and interests us, and the inescapable need to fashion ideas and relationships sufficiently powerful to deny our nothingness in the random profusion of the universe.

  As for future forms of human governance, I see as equally likely (as things look now) the chance that political freedom and diversity, or a brave new world of dumbing homogeneity and deadening control by consensus, will prevail or perhaps alternate in increasingly destructive cycles. For the Internet is currently both the oxygen of a truly open society and of spectacular transnational terrorism.

  Here are two snippets that illustrate this duality:

  “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog,” says the cunning canine in Peter Steiner’s 1993 New Yorker cartoon; and on the Internet, any two communicators can believe they are the world.

  “The media is [sic] coming!” Skyped the Lashkar-e-Taiba handler to the killers for God at the Taj Hotel in Mumbai, signaling to them that now was the best timing for their martyrdom.

  Around the Shi’ite holiday of Ashura—December 28, 2009—I received an e-mail from a friend in Tehran who said how helpless he felt to stop the merciless beating of a young woman by government thugs, but he went on to say, “We will win this thing if the West does nothing but help us keep the lines of communication open with satellite Internet.” The same day, I saw the Facebook communications of the Christmas plane bomber and the army psychiatrist who shot up Fort Hood—both of them, along with many others, self-bound into a virtual community whose Internet imams spin Web dreams of glory in exchange for real and bloody sacrifice.

  “I imagine how the great jihad will take place, how the Muslims will win, insha Allah [God willing], and rule the whole world, and establish the greatest empire once again!!!” reads one post from “farouk 1986,” the angel-faced, British-educated engineering student and son of a prominent Nigerian banker who attempted to blow up Northwest flight 253 out of Amsterdam as it was about to land in Detroit. “Happiness is martyrdom” can be as emotionally contagious to a lonely boy on the Internet as “Yes, we can.” That is a psychologically stunning and socially far-reaching development that scientists have hardly begun to explore.

  And so, as a result of the advent of the Internet, I spend most of my time these days trying to think how, with the aid of the Internet, to keep farouk 1986 and friends from blowing people to kingdom come.

  The Collapse of Cultures

  Human rights constitutes a pillar of one global political culture, originally centered on the Americas and Europe, and is a growing part of a massive, Internet-driven global political awakening. The decidedly nonsecular jihad is another key mover in this transnational political awakening: thoroughly modern and innovative, despite its atavistic cultural references. Its appeal, to youth especially, lies in its promise of moral simplicity, a harmonious and egalitarian community (at least for men) whose extent is limitless, and the call to passion and action on humanity’s behalf. It is a twisting of the tenets of human rights, the granting to each individual the “natural right” of sovereignty. It claims a moral duty to annihilate any opposition to the coming of true justice, and gives the righteous the prerogative to kill. The end justifies the means; no sacrifice of individuals is too costly for progress toward the final good.

  Many made giddy by globalization—the ever faster and deeper integration of individuals, corporations, markets, nations, technologies, and knowledge—believe that a connected world inexorably shrinks differences and divisions, making everyone safer and more secure in one great big happy family. If only it were not for people’s premodern parochial biases: religions, ethnicities, native languages, nations, borders, trade barriers, historical chips on the shoulder.

  This sentiment is especially common among scientists (me included) and the deacons of Davos, wealthy and powerful globetrotters who schmooze with one another in airport VIP clubs, three-star restaurants, and five-star hotels and feel that pleasant buzz of camaraderie over wine or martinis at the end of the day. I don’t reject this world; I sometimes embrace it.

  But my field experience and experiments in a variety of cultural settings lead me to believe that an awful lot of people on this planet respond to global connectivity very differently than does the power elite. While economic globalization has steamrolled or left aside large chunks of humankind, political globalization actively engages people of all societies and walks of life—even the global economy’s driftwood: refugees, migrants, marginals, and those most frustrated in their aspirations.

  For there is, together with a flat and fluid world, a more tribal, fragmented, and divisive world, as people unmoored from millennial traditions and cultures flail about in search of a social identity that is at once individual and intimate but with a greater sense of purpose and possibility of survival than a human, or humankind, alone.

  Ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union, which shattered the briefly timeless illusion of a stable bipolar world, and for the first time in history, most of humanity is politically engaged. Many, especially the young, are becoming increasingly independent, yet interactive in the search for respect and meaning in life, in their visions of economic advancement and environmental awareness. These youth form their identities in terms of global political cultures through exposure to the media.

  Even justice for the blistered legacies of imperialism and colonialism is now more a struggle over contemporary construction of cultural identity, and how the media should represent the past, than over righting the actual wrongs that were perpetrated. Global political cultures arise horizontally, among peers with different histories, rather than vertically as before, in traditions passed from generation to generation. Jihad offers the pride of great achievements for the underachieving: brave new hearts for an outworn and overstretched world.

  Traditionally, politics and religion were closely connected to ethnicity and territory, and in more recent times to nations and cultural areas (or “civilizations”). No longer. Religion and politics are becoming increasingly detached from their cultures of origin, not so much because of the movement of peoples (only about 3 percent of the world’s population migrates, notes French political scientist Olivier Roy) but because of the worldwide traffic of media-friendly information and ideas. Thus, contrary to those who see global conflicts along long-standing “fault lines” and a “clash of civilizations,” these conflicts represent a collapse of traditional territorial cultures, not their resurgence. The crisis is most likely to be resolved, I believe, in cyberspace. To what end, I cannot tell but can only hope.

  Transience Is Now Permanence

  Douglas Coupland

  Writer, artist, designer; author, Generation A

  The Internet has made me very casual, with a level of omniscience that was unthinkable a decade ago. I now wonder if God gets bored knowing the answer to everything.

  The Internet forces me, as a creator, to figure out who I really am and what is unique to me—or to anyone else, for that matter. I like this.

  The Internet forces me to come to grips with the knowledge that my mother has visited many truly frightening places online that I’ll never know about—and certainly don’t want to know about. I no longer believe in a certain sort of naïveté.

  The Internet toys with my sense of permanence. Every tiny transient moment now lasts forever: homework, e-mails, JPEGs, sex acts . . . we all know the list. Yesterday I looked up a discontinued brand of Campbell’s Soup called Noodles and Ground Beef and was taken (via Google Books) to page 37 of the February 1976 issue of Ebony magazine, to a recipe for Beefy Tomato Burger Soup that incorporated a can of the aforementioned soup. You’d have thought something that ephemeral would have evaded Google’s reach, but no. Transience is now permanence. At the same time, things that were supposed to be around forever (newspapers) are now transient. This is an astonishing inversion of time perception that I’ve yet to fully absorb. Its long-term effect on me is to heighten my worry about the fate of the middle classes (doomed) as well as
to make me wonder about the future of homogeneous bourgeois thinking (also doomed, as we turn into one great big college town populated entirely by eccentrics—a great big Austin, Texas).

  The Internet forces me to renegotiate my relationship to the celebrity dimension of pop culture. There are too many celebrities now, and they all cancel each other out (every fifteen minutes), so there aren’t megastars, like there used to be. You might as well be eccentric yourself.

  The Internet gives me hope that in the future everyone will wear Halloween costumes 365 days a year.

  The Internet has certainly demystified my sense of geography and travel. On Google Maps, I’ve explored remote Antarctic valleys as well as Robert Smithson’s sculptural earthwork “Spiral Jetty.” And we’ve all taken BlackBerrys everywhere. In so many ways, anywhere is basically as good as anywhere else—so let’s hope you ended up somewhere with a nice climate and pleasant scenery when the music stopped in the fall of 2008.

  Speaking of music, the Internet has made me much more engaged with musical culture than I might have hoped for when coming of age in the 1970s. It used to be that a person’s musical taste was frozen around the age of twenty-three. Once this happened, a person (usually a guy) spent the rest of his life worshipping stacks of lovingly maintained 33 rpm vinyl. Nowadays the curation of an individual’s personal taste never ends. People don’t ask, “Have you heard the new [whatever]?” Instead it’s “What have you found lately?” It’s friendlier and allows for communication between people of all ages.