FRACTALNOIA
FINDING PATTERNS IN THE FEEDBACK
“Everything is everything,” Cheryl declares, as if having solved the puzzle of life. The late-night-radio caller says she finally gets “how it all fits together.”
She is speaking, at least initially, about chemtrails. Cheryl is convinced that the white vapor trails being drawn across the sky by planes actually contain more than jet exhaust. “The patterns have changed. And then when the tsunami hit, it all suddenly made sense. I could see the big picture.”
The picture Cheryl has put together looks something like this: the condensation trails left in the wake of airplanes have been changing over the past decades. They form very particular patterns in the sky, and they do not fade as quickly as they used to. They also appear to contain shiny, rainbowlike particles within them. This is because they are laced with chemicals that eventually shower down upon us all.
Like the thousands of other chemtrail spotters in the United States, Cheryl was mystified and concerned, but could only theorize as to what the chemicals were for. Mind control? Forced sterilization? Experimentation with new germ-warfare techniques? Then, when Japan was struck by an earthquake and tsunami in March 2011, so soon after that nation had rejected an American-led trade pact, she realized what was going on: the chemtrails are depositing highly conductive particles that allow for better long-distance functioning of the HAARP weather-controlling station in Alaska, run by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). As everyone knows, HAARP, the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program, isn’t just for researching the ionosphere, but for broadcasting signals that can change the weather, create earthquakes, and manufacture consent for the coming world government.
The host of the program calls her analysis “illuminating” and says he’ll be having a chemtrail expert on very soon to help “tie together all these loose ends, and more.”
Cheryl’s theory of how it all fits together isn’t unique. There are dozens of websites and YouTube videos making similar connections between the weather, military, economy, HAARP, natural disasters, and jet emissions. And they make up just a tiny fraction of the so-called conspiracy theories gaining traction online and in other media, connecting a myriad of loose ends, from 9/11 and Barack Obama’s birthplace to the Bilderberg Group and immunizations.
They matter less for the solutions they come up with or the accusations they make than for the underlying need driving them all: to make sense of the world in the present tense. When there is no linear time, how is a person supposed to figure out what’s going on? There’s no story, no narrative to explain why things are the way they are. Previously distinct causes and effects collapse into one another. There’s no time between doing something and seeing the result; instead, the results begin accumulating and influencing us before we’ve even completed an action. And there’s so much information coming in at once, from so many different sources, that there’s simply no way to trace the plot over time. Without the possibility of a throughline we’re left to make sense of things the way a character comes to great recognitions on a postnarrative TV show like Lost or The Wire: by making connections.
While we may blame the Internet for the ease with which conspiracy theories proliferate, the net is really much more culpable for the way it connects everything to almost everything else. The hypertext link, as we used to call it, allows any fact or idea to become intimately connected with any other. New content online no longer requires new stories or information, just new ways of linking things to other things. Or as the social networks might put it to you, “Jane is now friends with Tom.” The connection has been made; the picture is getting more complete.
It’s as if we are slowly connecting everyone to everyone else and everything else. Of course, once everyone is connected to everyone and everything else, nothing matters anymore. If everyone in the world is your Facebook friend, then why have any Facebook friends at all? We’re back where we started. The ultimate complexity is just another entropy. Or as Cheryl put it, “Everything is everything.”
The ease with which we can now draw lines of connectivity between people and things is matched only by our need to find patterns in a world with no enduring story lines. Without time, we can’t understand things in terms of where they came from or where they are going to. We can’t relate to things as having purpose or intention, beginnings or endings. We no longer have career paths, but connections and org charts. We don’t have an economy of investments over time, but an economy of current relationships. We don’t relate to the logic of sequential PowerPoint slides anymore, but to the zoomable canvas of Prezi, a presentation utility in which a single complicated picture is slowly revealed as the sum of many connected parts. We don’t have a history of the world but a map of the world. A data visualization. A story takes time to tell; a picture exists in the static moment.
We can’t create context in time, so we create it through links. This is connected to that. This reminds us of that. This reflects that. The entire universe begins to look holographic, where each piece somehow reflects the whole.
It’s a sensibility we find reinforced by systems theory and chaos math. Fractals (those computer-rendered topologies that were to early cyberculture what paisley was to the 1960s) help us make sense of rough, natural phenomena, everything from clouds and waves to rocks and forests. Unlike traditional, Euclidean mathematics, which has tended to smooth out complexity, reducing it down to oversimplified lines and curves, fractal geometry celebrates the way real objects aren’t really one, two, or three dimensions, but ambiguously in between.
Fractals are really just recursive equations—iterations upon iterations of numbers. But when they are rendered by computers, they churn out beautiful, complex patterns. They can look like a coral reef or a fern or a weather system. What makes fractals so interesting is that they are self-similar. If you zoom in on a shape in the pattern and look at the image at a much higher scale, you find that very same shape reappearing in the details on this new level. Zoom in again and the patterns emerge again.
On the one hand, this makes fractals terrifically orienting: as above, so below. Nature is patterned, which is part of what makes a walk in the woods feel reassuring. The shapes of the branches are reflected in the veins of the leaves and the patterns of the paths between the trunks. The repeating patterns in fractals also seem to convey a logic or at least a pattern underlying the chaos. On the other hand, once you zoom in to a fractal, you have no way of knowing which level you are on. The details at one level of magnification may be the same as on any other. Once you dive in a few levels, you are forever lost. Like a dream within a dream within a dream (as in the movie Inception), figuring out which level you are on can be a challenge, or even futile.
Meanwhile, people are busy using fractals to explain any system that has defied other, more reductionist approaches. Since they were successfully applied by IBM’s Benoit Mandlebrot to the problem of seemingly random, intermittent interference on phone lines, fractals have been used to identify underlying patterns in weather systems, computer files, and bacteria cultures. Sometimes fractal enthusiasts go a bit too far, however, using these nonlinear equations to mine for patterns in systems where none exist. Applied to the stock market or to consumer behavior, fractals may tell less about those systems than about the people searching for patterns within them.
There is a dual nature to fractals: They orient us while at the same time challenging our sense of scale and appropriateness. They offer us access to the underlying patterns of complex systems while at the same time tempting us to look for patterns where none exist. This makes them a terrific icon for the sort of pattern recognition associated with present shock—a syndrome we’ll call fractalnoia. Like the robots on Mystery Science Theater 3000, we engage by relating one thing to another, even when the relationship is forced or imagined. The tsunami makes sense once it is connected to chemtrails, which make sense when they are connected to HAARP.
It’s
not just conspiracy theorists drawing fractalnoid connections between things. In a world without time, any and all sense making must occur on the fly. Simultaneity often seems like all we have. That’s why anyone contending with present shock will have a propensity to make connections between things happening in the same moment—as if there had to be an underlying logic. On the business-news channels, video footage of current events or presidential press conferences plays above the digital ticker tape of real-time stock quotes. We can’t help but look to see how the president’s words are influencing the Dow Jones average, as if sentiment on the trading floor really was reacting in live response to the news. Or maybe it is?
In an even more pronounced version of market fractalnoia, online business-news services such as the Wall Street Journal’s website or CBS MarketWatch rush to report on and justify stock market fluctuations. They strain to connect an upbeat report from the European Central Bank to the morning’s 50-point rise—as if they know there is a connection between the two potentially unrelated events. By the time the story is posted to the Web, stocks are actually lower, and the agencies are hard at work searching for a housing report or consumer index that may explain the new trend, making the news services appear to be chasing their own tails.
This doesn’t mean pattern recognition is futile. It only shows how easy it is to draw connections where there are none, or where the linkage is tenuous at best. Even Marshall McLuhan realized that a world characterized by electronic media would be fraught with chaos and best navigated through pattern recognition. This is not limited to the way we watch media but is experienced in the way we watch and make choices in areas such as business, society, and war.
Rapid churn on the business landscape has become the new status quo, as giants like Kodak fall and upstarts like Facebook become more valuable than oil companies. What will be the next Zynga or Groupon? Surely it won’t be another social-gaming or online-coupon company—but what would be their equivalent in the current moment? How do we connect the dots? On the geopolitical stage, war no longer occurs on battlefields or in relationship to some diplomatic narrative, but as a series of crises, terrorist attacks, or otherwise disproportionate warfare. Where and when will the next attack take place?
The trick is to see the shapes of the patterns rather than the content within them—the medium more than the message. As I have come to understand the cultural swirl, media events tend to matter less for whatever they are purportedly about than for the space they fill. Charlie Sheen did not rise to Twitter popularity merely by being fired from his sitcom and posting outlandish things; he was filling an existential vacuum created in the wake of the Arab Spring story immediately preceding him. In effect our highly mediated culture creates a standing wave; the next suitable celebrity or story that comes along just happens to fill it. Or, as I explained in my book Media Virus, the spread of a particular virus depends no more on the code within the virus than it does on the immune response of the culture at large.
However counterintuitive this may seem: sometimes the best way to see where things are going is to take our eyes off the ball. We don’t identify the next great investment opportunity by chasing the last one, but by figuring out what sorts of needs that last one was fulfilling, and the one before that. We don’t predict the next suicide bombing by reading the justifications for civil unrest in a foreign-policy journal but by inferring the connections between nodes in the terror network. Like a surfer riding the tide, we learn to look less at the water than at the waves.
In doing so, and as we’ll see in this chapter, we quickly realize that pattern recognition is a shared activity. Just as the three-dimensional world is best perceived through two eyes, a complex map of connections is better understood from more than one perspective at a time. Reinforcing self-similarity on every level, a network of people is better at mapping connections than a lone individual. As author and social critic Steven Johnson would remind us, ideas don’t generally emerge from individuals, but from groups, or what he calls “liquid networks.”1 The coffeehouses of eighteenth-century London spawned the ideas that fueled the Enlightenment, and the Apple computer was less a product of one mind than the collective imagination of the Homebrew Computer Club to which both Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak belonged.
The notion of a lone individual churning out ideas in isolated contemplation like Rodin’s Thinker may not be completely untrue, but it has certainly been deemphasized in today’s culture of networked thinking. As we become increasingly linked to others and dependent on making connections in order to make sense, these new understandings of how ideas emerge are both helpful and reassuring. For example, researcher Kevin Dunbar recorded hundreds of hours of video of scientists working in labs. When he analyzed the footage, he saw that the vast majority of breakthroughs did not occur when the scientists were alone staring into their microscopes or poring over data, but rather when they were engaged with one another at weekly lab meetings or over lunch.2
This sort of observation provides a bit of comfort to those of us slow to warm to the fact that thinking is no longer a personal activity, but a collective one. Nothing’s personal—except maybe the devices through which we connect with the network. New ideas seem to emerge from a dozen places at once, a mysterious zeitgeist synchronicity until we realize that they are all aspects of the same idea, emerging from a single network of minds. Likewise, each human brain is itself a network of neurons, sharing tasks and functioning holographically and nonlocally. Thoughts don’t belong to any one cell any more than ideas belong to any one brain in the greater network of a connected human culture.
The anxiety of influence gives way to the acceptance of intimacy and shared credit. Many young people I encounter are already more than comfortable losing their privacy to social networks, preferring to see it as preparation for an even less private, almost telepathic future in which people know one another’s thoughts, anyway. In a networked ideascape, the ownership of an idea becomes as quaint and indefensible a notion as copyright or patents. Since ideas are built on the logic of others, there is no way to trace their independent origins. It’s all just access to the shared consciousness. Everything is everything. Acceptance of this premise feels communist or utopian; resistance feels like paranoia.
Regardless of whether this culture of connectivity will bring us to greater levels of innovation and prosperity, this culture is certainly upon us. Learning how to recognize and exploit patterns without falling into full-fledged fractalnoia will soon be a required survival skill for individuals, businesses, and even nations.
THE FEEDBACK LOOP: PARSING SCREECH
“That Tweet could be the beginning of the end,” the CEO told me, slowly closing his office door as if to mask the urgency of the situation from workers in cubicles outside. In less than 140 characters, a well-followed Tweeter was able to foist an attack on a corporation as disproportional and devastating as crashing a hijacked plane into an office tower.
The details of the scandal are unimportant. It turned out the Twitter-amplified attack on the company was actually initiated by the improper use of hashtags by the company’s own hired online publicity firm, anyway. But the speed with which error became a virus and then spread into a public relations nightmare covered by mainstream media was shocking. At least it was shocking to a CEO accustomed to the nice, slow pace of change of traditional media. Back then, a company would be asked for a comment, or a CEO could pick up the phone and talk to a few editors before a story went out. A smart PR firm could nip it in the bud.
Now there is no bud. Just pollen. Everywhere. It’s not merely a shift in the pace of media—as when things shifted from delivered print newspapers to broadcast TV—but in the direction of transmission. And even then, it’s more complex and chaotic then we may first suspect. To an imperiled politician or CEO, the entire world seems to have become the enemy. Everything is everything.
For many of us, this goes against intuition. We like to think having more connections makes us more resili
ent. Isn’t more friends a good thing? Yes, there is strength in networks—particularly grass-roots networks that grow naturally over time and enjoy many levels of mutual support. But all this connectedness can also make us less resilient.
In a globally connected economy, there is no such thing as an isolated crash. It used to be that the fall of one market meant another was going up. Now, because they are all connected, markets cannot fall alone. A collapse in one small European nation also takes down the many overseas banks that have leveraged its debt. There’s nowhere to invest that’s insulated from any other market’s problems. Likewise, thanks to the interconnectedness of our food supply and transportation networks, the outbreak of a disease on the poultry farms of China necessarily threatens to become a global pandemic. A connected world is like a table covered with loaded mousetraps. If one trap snaps, the rest of the table will follow in rapid, catastrophic succession. Like a fight between siblings in the back of the car on a family trip, it doesn’t matter who started it. Everybody is in it, now.
Along with most technology hopefuls of the twentieth century, I was one of the many pushing for more connectivity and openness as the millennium approached. It seemed the only answer for our collapsing, top-down society was for everyone and everything to network together and communicate better and more honestly. Instead of emulating a monarchy or a factory, our society could emulate a coral reef—where each organism and colony experiences itself as part of a greater entity. Some called it Gaia, others called it evolution, others called it the free market, and still others called it systems theory. Whatever the metaphor, a connected world would respond more rapidly and empathically to crises in remote regions, it would become more aware of threats to its well-being, and may actually become more cooperative as a whole. It seemed possible that a networked human society of this type may even have some thoughts or purpose of its own.
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