Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?

by John Brockman

If it is true that the experience of controlling and sustaining your focus of attention is one of the deeper layers of phenomenal selfhood, then what we are currently witnessing is not only an organized attack on the space of consciousness per se but also a mild form of depersonalization. New medial environments may therefore create a new form of waking consciousness that resembles weakly subjective states—a mixture of dreaming, dementia, intoxication, and infantilization. Now we all do this together, every day. I call it public dreaming.

  The Age of (Quantum) Information?

  Anton Zeilinger

  Physicist, University of Vienna; scientific director, Institute of Quantum Optics and Quantum Information, Austrian Academy of Sciences; author, Dance of the Photons: From Einstein to Quantum Teleportation

  Yes, I have learned, like many others,

  To write short e-mails, because people don’t want to read beyond line ten

  To write single-issue e-mails, because second or third issues get lost

  To check my e-mails on the iPhone or BlackBerry every five minutes, because the important message could arrive at any moment

  To expect that our brain function will significantly be reduced in the coming decades to very simple decision making

  And so on and so on.

  Well, seriously, I find it utterly impressive how the notion of information is becoming more and more important in our society. Or, rather, the notion of what we think information is. What is information? From a pragmatic, operational point of view, one could argue that information is the truth value of a proposition. Is it raining now? Yes/no. Do airplanes fly because they are lighter than air? Yes/no. Does she love me? Yes/no.

  Evidently, there are questions that are easy to answer and others that are difficult or maybe even impossible to answer in a reliable way—such as the last one. Whereas for the first two questions we can devise scientific procedures for how to decide them (even including borderline cases), for the last question such an algorithm seems impossible, even though some of our biology friends try to convince us that it is just a matter of deterministic procedures in our brains and our bodies. There are other questions that will forever be beyond any methodical scientific decision procedures, such as “Does God exist?” or “Which of the two slits in a double-slit interference experiment does a quantum particle pass through?”

  Those last two questions are of different natures, although both are unanswerable. Not only is the question as to whether God exists beyond any solid scientific argumentation, but it must be like that. Any other possibility would be the end of religion. If God were provably existent, then the notion of belief would be empty; any religious behavior would be mere opportunism. But what about the quantum question? Which of the two paths does a particle take in a double-slit experiment?

  We learned from quantum physics that to answer this kind of question we need to do an experiment allowing us to determine whether the particle takes slit A or slit B. But doing that, we also learned, significantly modifies the experiment itself. Answering the question implies introducing the specific apparatus that allows us to answer it. Introducing an apparatus that permits us to determine which slit a particle takes automatically means that the phenomenon of quantum interference disappears, because of the unavoidable interaction with that apparatus. Or, in the case of the famous Schrödinger cat, asking whether the cat is alive or dead immediately destroys the quantum superposition of the alive and dead states.

  Therefore, we have here a completely new situation, not encountered before in science—and probably not in philosophy, either: Creating a situation in which a question can be answered modifies the situation. An experimental quantum setup, or any quantum situation, can represent only a finite amount of information—here, either interference or path information. And it is up to the experimentalist to decide which information is actually existing, real, manifest, in a concrete situation. The experimentalist does this by choosing appropriate apparatus. So information has a fundamental nature of a new kind—a kind not present in classical, nonquantum science.

  What does this have to do with the Internet? Today we are busy developing quantum communication over large distances. Using quantum communication links, we will connect future quantum computers that work on a completely new level of complexity, compared with existing computers. To the best of my knowledge, this will be the first time that humanity has developed a technology that has no parallel at all in the known universe (assuming that the functioning of the brain can, in the end, be explained by nonquantum processes).

  What will this mean for our communication? It’s impossible to tell. It’s a prospect even murkier than the predictions about the applications of the laser or the microchip, just to name two more recent examples. We will be entering a completely new world, where information is even more fundamental than it is today. And one can hope that the present irritation experienced by many because of the Internet will turn out to have been just an episode in the development of humanity. But maybe I am being too optimistic.

  Edge, A to Z (Pars Pro Toto)

  Hans Ulrich Obrist

  Curator, Serpentine Gallery, London; editor, A Brief History of Curating; Formulas for Now

  A is for And

  The Internet made me think more BOTH/AND instead of EITHER/OR or NEITHER/NOR.

  B is for Beginnings

  In terms of my curatorial thinking, my eureka moments occurred pre-Internet, when I met visionary Swiss artists Fischli/Weiss (Peter Fischli and David Weiss) in 1985. These conversations freed me up—freed my thoughts as to what curating could be and how curating can produce reality. The arrival of the Internet was a trigger for me to think more in the form of Oulipian lists—practical-poetical, evolutive, and often nonlinear lists. This A to Z, as you’ll see, is an incomplete list . . . Umberto Eco calls the World Wide Web the “mother of all lists,” infinite by definition and in constant evolution.

  C is for Curating the World

  The Internet made me think toward a more expanded notion of curating. Stemming from the Latin curare, the word curating originally meant “to take care of objects in museums.” Curation has long since evolved. Just as art is no longer limited to traditional genres, curating no longer is confined to the gallery or museum but has expanded across all boundaries. The rather obscure and very specialized notion of curating has become much more publicly used—one talks about the curating of Websites—and this marks a very good moment to rediscover the pioneering history of art curating as a toolbox for twenty-first-century society at large.

  D is for Delinking

  In the years before being online, there were many interruptions by phone and fax day and night. The reality of being permanently linked triggered my increasing awareness of the importance of moments of concentration—moments without interruption that require me to be completely unreachable. I no longer answer the phone at home, and I answer my mobile phone only in the case of fixed telephone appointments. To link is beautiful. To delink is sublime (Paul Chan).

  D is also for Disrupted narrative continuity

  Forms of film montage, as the disruption of narrative and the disruption of spatial and temporal continuity, have been a staple tactic of the avant-garde from Cubism and Eisenstein through Brecht to Kluge or Godard. For avant-gardism as a whole, it was essential that these tactics be recognized (experienced) as a disruption. The Internet has made disruption and montage the operative bases of everyday experience. Today, these forms of disruption can be harnessed and poeticized. They can foster new connections, new relationships, new productions of reality: reality as life-montage/life as reality-disruption? Not one story but many stories . . .

  D is for Doubt

  A certain unreliability of technical and material information on the Internet brings us to the notion of doubt. I feel that doubt has become more pervasive. The artist Carsten Höller has invented the Laboratory of Doubt, which is opposed to mere representation. As he has told me, “Doubt and perplexity . . . are unsightly states
of mind we’d rather keep under lock and key because we associate them with uneasiness, with a failure of values.” Höller’s credo is not to do, not to intervene. To exist is to do, and not to do is a way of doing. “Doubt is alive; it paralyzes certainty.”

  E is for Evolutive exhibitions

  The Internet makes me think more about nonfinal exhibitions, exhibitions in a state of becoming. When conceiving exhibitions, I sometimes like to think of randomized algorithms, access, transmission, mutation, infiltration, circulation (the list goes on). The Internet makes me think of exhibitions less as top-down master plans than as bottom-up processes of self-organization.

  F is for Forgetting

  The ever growing, ever pervasive records that the Internet produces make me think sometimes about the virtues of forgetting. Is a limited life-space of certain information and data becoming more urgent?

  H is for Handwriting (and drawing, ever drawing)

  The Internet has made me aware of the importance of handwriting and drawing. I typed all my early texts, but the more the Internet has become all-encompassing, the more I have felt that something went missing. Hence the idea to reintroduce handwriting. More and more of my correspondence consists of handwritten letters scanned and sent by e-mail. On a professional note, I observe, as a curator, the importance of drawing in current art production. One can also see it in art schools: a moment when drawing is an incredibly fertile zone.

  I is for Identity

  “Identity is shifty, identity is a choice” (Etel Adnan).

  I is also for Inactual considerations

  The future is always built out of fragments of the past. The Internet has brought thinking more into the present tense, raising questions of what it means to be contemporary. Recently, Giorgio Agamben revisited Nietzsche’s “Inactual Considerations,” arguing that the one who belongs to his or her own time is the one who does not coincide perfectly with it. It is because of this shift, this anachronism, that he or she is more apt than others to perceive and to capture his or her time. Agamben follows this observation with his second definition of contemporaneity: The contemporary is the one who is able to perceive obscurity, who is not blinded by the lights of his or her time or century.

  This leads us, interestingly, to the importance of astrophysics in explaining the relevance of obscurity for contemporaneity. The seeming obscurity in the sky is the light that travels to us at full speed but which can’t reach us because the galaxies from which it originates are ceaselessly moving away from us at a speed superior to that of light. The Internet and a certain resistance to its present tense have made me increasingly aware that there is an urgent call to be contemporary. To be contemporary means to perpetually come back to a present where we have never yet been. To be contemporary means to resist the homogenization of time, through ruptures and discontinuities.

  M is for Maps

  The Internet increased the presence of maps in my thinking. It’s become easier to make maps, to change them, and also to work on them collaboratively and collectively and share them (e.g., Google Maps and Google Earth). After the focus on social networks of the last couple of years, I have come to see the focus on location as a key dimension.

  N is for New geographies

  The Internet has fueled (and been fueled by) a relentless economic and cultural globalization, with all its positive and negative aspects. On the one hand, there is the danger of homogenizing forces, which is also at stake in the world of the arts. On the other hand, there are unprecedented possibilities for difference-enhancing global dialogs. In the long duration, there have been seismic shifts, like that in the sixteenth century, when the paradigm shifted from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic. We are living through a period in which the center of gravity is transferring to new centers. The early twenty-first century is seeing the growth of a polyphony of art centers in the East and West as well as in the North and South.

  N is also for Nonmediated experiences; N is for the New live

  I feel a growing desire for nonmediated experiences. Depending on one’s point of view, the virtual may be a new and liberating prosthesis of the body or it may threaten the body. Many visual artists today negotiate and mediate between these two staging encounters of nonmediated intersubjectivity. In the music fields, the crisis of the record industry goes hand in hand with the greater importance of live concerts.

  P is for Parallel realities

  The Internet creates and fosters new constituencies, new microcommunities. As a system that infinitely breeds new realities, it is predisposed to reproduce itself in a proliferating series of ever more functionally differentiated subsystems. As such, it makes my thinking go toward the production of parallel realities, bearing witness to the multiverse (as the physicist David Deutsch might say), and for better or worse the Internet allows that which is already latent in the “fabric of reality” to unravel itself and expand in all directions.

  P is also for Protest against forgetting

  I feel an urgency to conduct more and more interviews, to make an effort to preserve traces of intelligence from the last few decades—particularly the testimonies of the twentieth-century pioneers who are in their eighties or nineties (or older) and whom I regularly interview: testimonies about a century from those who are not online and who very often fall into oblivion. This protest might, as Rem Koolhaas has told me, act as “a hedge against the systematic forgetting that hides at the core of the information age and which may in fact be its secret agenda.”

  S is for Salon of the twenty-first century

  The Internet has made me think more about whom I would like to introduce to whom, and about whether to cyberintroduce people or introduce them in person through actual salons for the twenty-first century (see the Brutally Early Club).

  The Degradation of Predictability—and Knowledge

  Nassim N. Taleb

  Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering, New York University–Polytechnic Institute; principal, Universa Investments; author, The Black Swan

  I used to think the problem of information is that it turns Homo sapiens into fools—we gain disproportionately in confidence, particularly in domains where information is wrapped in a high degree of noise (say, epidemiology, genetics, economics, etc.). So we end up thinking we know more than we do, which, in economic life, causes foolish risk taking. When I started trading, I went on a news diet and I saw things with more clarity. I also saw how people built too many theories based on sterile news, fooled by the randomness effect. But things are a lot worse. Now I think that, in addition, the supply and spread of information turns the world into Extremistan (a world I describe as one in which random variables are dominated by extremes, with Black Swans playing a large role in them). The Internet, by spreading information, causes an increase in interdependence, the exacerbation of fads (bestsellers like Harry Potter and runs on banks become planetary). Such a world is more “complex,” more moody, much less predictable.

  So consider the explosive situation: More information (particularly thanks to the Internet) causes more confidence and illusions of knowledge while degrading predictability.

  Look at the economic crisis that started in 2008, There are about a million persons on the planet who identify themselves as in the field of economics. Yet just a handful realized the possibility and depth of what could take place and protected themselves from the consequences. At no time in the history of humankind have we lived in so much ignorance (easily measured in terms of forecast errors) coupled with so much intellectual hubris. At no point have we had central bankers missing elementary risk metrics—like debt levels, which even the Babylonians understood well.

  I recently talked to a scholar of rare wisdom and erudition, Jon Elster, who, upon exploring themes from social science, integrates insights from all authors in the corpus of the past twenty-five hundred years, from Cicero and Seneca to Montaigne and Proust. He showed me how Seneca had a very sophisticated understanding of loss aversion. I felt guilty for the time
I spent on the Internet. Upon getting home, I found in my mail a volume of posthumous essays by Bishop Pierre Daniel Huet, called Huetiana, put together by his admirers circa 1722. It is saddening to realize that, having been born nearly four centuries after Huet, and having done most of my reading with material written after his death, I am not much more advanced in wisdom than he was. Moderns at the upper end are no wiser than their equivalent among the ancients; if anything, they are much less refined.

  So I am now on an Internet diet, in order to understand the world a bit better—and make another bet on horrendous mistakes by economic policy makers. I am not entirely deprived of the Internet; this is just a severe diet with strict rationing. True, technologies are the greatest things in the world, but they have far too monstrous side effects—and ones rarely seen ahead of time. And since I have been spending time in the silence of my library with little informational pollution, I can feel harmony with my genes; I feel I am growing again.

  Calling You on Your Crap

  Sean Carroll

  Theoretical physicist, Caltech; author, From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time

  I wanted to write that the Internet keeps people honest. The image of thousands of readers bursting into laughter gave me pause.

  So let me put it this way: The Internet helps enable honesty. Many of us basically want to be honest, but we’re fighting all sorts of other impulses—the desire to appear clever or knowledgeable, to support a point we’re trying to make, to feel the satisfaction of a rant well ranted. In everyday conversation, when we know something specific about the expertise and inclinations of our audience, these impulses may tempt us into laziness: pushing a point too hard, claiming as fact some anecdote whose veracity isn’t completely reliable. We’re only human.

  Nothing highlights our natural tendencies to exaggerate and overclaim quite like a widely distributed, highly interconnected communication network with nearly instantaneous feedback. There is no shortage of overblown and untrue claims on the Internet. But for those of us who would really like to be as honest and accurate as is reasonably possible, the Internet is an invaluable corrective.