by Kevin Kelly
Twenty years ago I might have been able to believe that in 2016 we’d have maps for the entire world on our personal handheld devices. But I could not have been convinced we’d have them with street views of the buildings for many cities, or apps that showed the locations of public toilets, and that it would give us spoken directions for walking or public transit, and that we’d have all this mapping and more “for free.” It seemed starkly impossible back then. And this free abundance still seems hard to believe in theory. Yet here it is on hundreds of millions of phones.
These supposed impossibilities keep happening with increased frequency. Everyone “knew” that people don’t work for free, and if they did, they could not make something useful without a boss. But today entire sections of our economy run on software instruments created by volunteers working without pay or bosses. Everyone knew humans were innately private beings, yet the impossibility of total open round-the-clock sharing still occurred. Everyone knew that humans are basically lazy, and they would rather watch than create, and they would never get off their sofas to create their own TV. It would be impossible that millions of amateurs would produce billions of hours of video, or that anyone would watch any of it. Like Wikipedia, YouTube is theoretically impossible. But here again this impossibility is real in practice.
This list goes on, old impossibilities appearing as new possibilities daily. But why now? What is happening to disrupt the ancient impossible/possible boundary?
As far as I can tell, the impossible things happening now are in every case due to the emergence of a new level of organization that did not exist before. These incredible eruptions are the result of large-scale collaboration, and massive real-time social interacting, which in turn are enabled by omnipresent instant connection between billions of people at a planetary scale. Just as fleshy tissue yields a new, higher level of organization for a bunch of individual cells, these new social structures yield new tissue for individual humans. Tissue can do things that cells can’t. The collectivist organizations of Wikipedia, Linux, Facebook, Uber, the web—even AI—can do things that industrialized humans could not. This is the first time on this planet that we’ve tied a billion people together in immediate syncopation, just as Facebook has done. From this new societal organization, new behaviors emerge that were impossible at the lower level.
Humans have long invented new social organizations, from law, courts, irrigation systems, schools, governments, libraries up to the largest scale, civilization itself. These social instruments are what makes us human—and what makes our behavior “impossible” from the vantage point of animals. For instance, when we invented written records and laws, these enabled a type of egalitarianism not possible in our cousins the primates, and not present in oral cultures. The cooperation and coordination bred by irrigation and agriculture produced yet more impossible behaviors of anticipation and preparation, and sensitivity to the future. Human society unleashed all kinds of previously impossible human behaviors into the biosphere.
The technium—the modern system of culture and technology—is accelerating the creation of new impossibilities by continuing to invent new social organizations. The genius of eBay was its invention of cheap, easy, and quick reputation status. Strangers could sell to strangers at a great distance because we now had a technology to quickly assign persistent reputations to those beyond our circle. That lowly innovation opened up a new kind of higher-level coordination that permitted a new kind of exchange (remote purchasing among strangers) that was impossible before. The same kind of technologically enabled trust, plus real-time coordination, makes the decentralized taxi service Uber possible. The “revert log” button on Wikipedia, which made it easier to restore a vandalized passage than to vandalize it, unleashed a new higher organization of trust, emphasizing one facet of human behavior not enabled at a large scale before.
We have just begun to fiddle with social communications. Hyperlinks, wifi, and GPS location services are really types of relationships enabled by technology, and this class of innovations is just beginning. The majority of the most amazing communication inventions that are possible have not been invented yet. We are also just in the infancy of being able to invent institutions at a truly global scale. When we weave ourselves together into a global real-time society, former impossibilities will really start to erupt into reality. It is not necessary that we invent some kind of autonomous global consciousness. It is only necessary that we connect everyone to everyone else—and to everything else—all the time and create new things together. Hundreds of miracles that seem impossible today will be possible with this shared human connectivity.
I am looking forward to having my mind changed a lot in the coming years. I think we’ll be surprised by how many of the things we assumed were “natural” for humans are not really natural at all. It might be fairer to say that what is natural for a tribe of mildly connected humans will not be natural for a planet of intensely connected humans. “Everyone knows” that humans are warlike, but I would guess organized war will become less attractive, or useful, over time as new means of social conflict resolution arise at a global level. Of course, many of the impossible things we can expect will be impossibly bad. The new technologies will unleash whole new ways to lie, cheat, steal, spy, and terrorize. We have no consensual international rules for cyberconflict, which means we can expect some very nasty unexpected “impossible” cyber events in the coming decade. Because of our global connectivity, a relatively simple hack could cause an emerging cascade of failure, which would reach impossible scale very quickly. Worldwide disruptions of our social fabric are in fact inevitable. One day in the next three decades the entire internet/phone system will blink off for 24 hours, and we’ll be in shock for years afterward.
I don’t focus on these expected downsides in this book for several reasons. First, there is no invention that cannot be subverted in some way to cause harm. Even the most angelic technology can be weaponized, and will be. Criminals are some of the most creative innovators in the world. And crap constitutes 80 percent of everything. But importantly, these negative forms follow exactly the same general trends I’ve been outlining for the positive. The negative, too, will become increasingly cognified, remixed, and filtered. Crime, scams, warring, deceit, torture, corruption, spam, pollution, greed, and other hurt will all become more decentralized and data centered. Both virtue and vice are subject to the same great becoming and flowing forces. All the ways that startups and corporations need to adjust to ubiquitous sharing and constant screening apply to crime syndicates and hacker squads as well. Even the bad can’t escape these trends.
Additionally, it may seem counterintuitive, but every harmful invention also provides a niche to create a brand-new never-seen-before good. Of course, that newly minted good can then be (and probably will be) abused by a corresponding bad idea. It may seem that this circle of new good provoking new bad which provokes new good which spawns new bad is just spinning us in place, only faster and faster. That would be true except for one vital difference: On each round we gain additional opportunities and choices that did not exist before. This expansion of choices (including the choice to do harm) is an increase in freedom—and this increase in freedoms and choices and opportunities is the foundation of our progress, of our humanity, and of our individual happiness.
Our technological spinning has thrown us up to a new level, opening up an entirely new continent of unknown opportunities and scary choices. The consequences of global-scale interactions are beyond us. The amount of data and power needed is inhuman; the vast realms of peta-, exa-, zetta-, zillion don’t really mean anything to us today because this is the vocabulary of megamachines, and of planets. We will certainly behave differently collectively than as individuals, but we don’t know how. Much more important, as individuals we behave differently in collectives.
This has been true for humans for a long while, ever since we moved to cities and began building civilizations. Wha
t’s new now and in the coming decades is the velocity of this higher territory of connectivity (speed of light), and its immensely vaster scale (the entire planet). We are headed for a trillion times increase. As noted earlier, a shift by a trillion is not merely a change in quantity, but a change in essence. Most of what “everybody knows” about human beings has so far been based on the human individual. But there may be a million different ways to connect several billion people, and each way will reveal something new about us. Or each way may create in us something new. Either way, our humanity will shift.
Connected, in real time, in multiple ways, at an increasingly global scale, in matters large and small, with our permission, we will operate at a new level, and we won’t cease surprising ourselves with impossible achievements. The impossibility of Wikipedia will quietly recede into outright obviousness.
In addition to hard-to-believe emergent phenomenon, we are headed to a world where the improbable is the new normal. Cops, emergency room doctors, and insurance agents see a bit of this already. They realize how many crazy impossible things actually happen all the time. For instance, a burglar gets stuck in a chimney; a truck driver in a head-on collision is thrown out his front window and lands on his feet, walking away; a wild antelope galloping across a bike trail knocks a man off his bicycle; a candle at a wedding ignites the bride’s hair on fire; a girl casually fishing off a backyard dock catches a huge man-size shark. In former times these unlikely events would be private, known only as rumors, stories a friend of a friend told, easily doubted and not really believed.
But today they are on YouTube, and they fill our vision. You can see them yourself. Each of these weird freakish events has been seen by millions.
The improbable consists of more than just accidents. The internets are also brimming with improbable feats of performance—someone who can run up a side of a building, or slide down suburban rooftops on a snowboard, or stack up cups faster than you can blink. And not just humans—pets open doors, ride scooters, and paint pictures. The improbable also includes extraordinary levels of superhuman achievements: people doing astonishing memory tasks, or imitating all the accents of the world. In these extreme feats we see the super in humans.
Every minute a new impossible thing is uploaded to the internet and that improbable event becomes just one of hundreds of extraordinary events that we’ll see or hear about today. The internet is like a lens that focuses the extraordinary into a beam, and that beam has become our illumination. It compresses the unlikely into a small viewable band of everydayness. As long as we are online—which is almost all day many days—we are illuminated by this compressed extraordinariness. It is the new normal.
That light of superness changes us. We no longer want mere presentations; we want the best, greatest, most extraordinary presenters alive, like in the TED videos. We don’t want to watch people playing games; we want to watch the highlights of the highlights, the most amazing moves, catches, runs, shots, and kicks, each one more remarkable and improbable than the other.
We are also exposed to the greatest range of human experience: the heaviest person, shortest midgets, longest mustache—the entire universe of superlatives. Superlatives were once rare—by definition—but now we see multiple videos of superlatives all day long, and they seem normal. Humans have always treasured drawings and photos of the weird extremes of humanity (witness early issues of National Geographic and Ripley’s Believe It or Not), but there is an intimacy about watching these extremities on our phones while we wait at the dentist. They are now much realer, and they fill our heads. I think there is already evidence that this ocean of extraordinariness is inspiring and daring ordinary folks to try something extraordinary.
At the same time, superlative epic failures are foremost as well. We are confronted by the stupidest people in the world doing the dumbest things imaginable. In some respects this may place us in a universe of nothing more than tiny, petty, obscure Guinness World Record holders. In every life there is probably at least one moment that is freakish, so everyone alive is a world record holder for 15 minutes. The good news may be that it cultivates in us an expanded sense of what is possible for humans, and for human life, and so extremism expands us. The bad news may be that this insatiable appetite for super-superlatives leads to dissatisfaction with anything ordinary.
There’s no end to this dynamic. Cameras are ubiquitous, so as our collective tracked life expands, we’ll accumulate thousands of videos showing people being struck by lightning—because improbable events are more normal than we think. When we all wear tiny cameras all the time, then the most improbable event, the most superlative achievement, the most extreme actions of anyone alive will be recorded and shared around the world in real time. Soon only the most extraordinary moments of 6 billion citizens will fill our streams. So henceforth rather than be surrounded by ordinariness we’ll float in extraordinariness—as it becomes mundane. When the improbable dominates our field of vision to the point that it seems as if the world contains only the impossible, then these improbabilities don’t feel as improbable. The impossible will feel inevitable.
There is a dreamlike quality to this state of improbability. Certainty itself is no longer as certain as it once was. When I am connected to the Screen of All Knowledge, to that billion-eyed hive of humanity woven together and mirrored on a billion pieces of glass, truth is harder to find. For every accepted piece of knowledge I come across, there is, within easy reach, a challenge to the fact. Every fact has its antifact. The internet’s extreme hyperlinking will highlight those antifacts as brightly as the facts. Some antifacts are silly, some borderline, and some valid. This is the curse of the screen: You can’t rely on experts to sort them out because for every expert there is an equal and opposite anti-expert. Thus anything I learn is subject to erosion by these ubiquitous antifactors.
Ironically, in an age of instant global connection, my certainty about anything has decreased. Rather than receiving truth from an authority, I am reduced to assembling my own certainty from the liquid stream of facts flowing through the web. Truth, with a capital T, becomes truths, plural. I have to sort the truths not just about things I care about, but about anything I touch, including areas about which I can’t possibly have any direct knowledge. That means that in general I have to constantly question what I think I know. We might consider this state perfect for the advancement of science, but it also means that I am more likely to have my mind changed for incorrect reasons.
While hooked into the network of networks I feel like I am a network myself, trying to achieve reliability from unreliable parts. And in my quest to assemble truths from half-truths, nontruths, and some noble truths scattered in the flux, I find my mind attracted to fluid ways of thinking (scenarios, provisional belief, subjective hunches) and toward fluid media like mashups, twitterese, and search. But as I flow through this slippery web of ideas, it often feels like a waking dream.
We don’t really know what dreams are for, only that they satisfy some fundamental need of consciousness. Someone watching me surf the web, as I jump from one suggested link to another, would see a daydream. On the web recently I found myself in a crowd of people watching a barefoot man eat dirt, then I saw a boy singing whose face began to melt, then Santa burned a Christmas tree, then I was floating inside a mud house on the very tippy top of the world, then Celtic knots untied themselves, then a guy told me the formula for making clear glass, then I was watching myself, back in high school, riding a bicycle. And that was just the first few minutes of my time surfing the web one morning. The trancelike state we fall into while following the undirected path of links could be seen as a terrible waste of time—or, like dreams, it might be a productive waste of time. Perhaps we are tapping into our collective unconscious as we roam the web. Maybe click-dreaming is a way for all of us to have the same dream, independent of what we click on.
This waking dream we call the internet also blurs the difference between
my serious thoughts and my playful thoughts, or to put it more simply: I no longer can tell when I am working and when I am playing online. For some people the disintegration between these two realms marks all that is wrong with the internet: It is the high-priced waster of time. It breeds trifles and turns superficialities into careers. Jeff Hammerbacher, a former Facebook engineer, famously complained that the “best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.” This waking dream is viewed by some as an addictive squandering. On the contrary, I cherish a good wasting of time as a necessary precondition for creativity. More important, I believe the conflation of play and work, of thinking hard and thinking playfully, is one of the greatest things this new invention has done. Isn’t the whole idea that in a highly evolved advanced society work is over?
I’ve noticed a different approach to my thinking now that the hive mind has spread it extremely wide and loose. My thinking is more active, less contemplative. Rather than begin a question or hunch by ruminating aimlessly in my mind, nourished only by my ignorance, I start doing things. I immediately go. I go looking, searching, asking, questioning, reacting, leaping in, constructing notes, bookmarks, a trail—I start off making something mine. I don’t wait. Don’t have to wait. I act on ideas first now instead of thinking on them. For some folks, this is the worst of the net—the loss of contemplation. Others feel that all this frothy activity is simply stupid busywork, or spinning of wheels, or illusionary action. But compared with what? Compared with the passive consumption of TV? Or time spent lounging at a bar chatting? Or the slow trudge to a library only to find no answers to the hundreds of questions I have? Picture the thousands of millions of people online at this very minute. To my eye they are not wasting time with silly associative links, but are engaged in a more productive way of thinking—getting instant answers, researching, responding, daydreaming, browsing, being confronted with something very different, writing down their own thoughts, posting their opinions, even if small. Compare that to the equivalent of hundreds of millions of people 50 years ago watching TV or reading a newspaper in a big chair.