You and Your Friends Versus Me and the Revolution

The Revolution is Coming. With Pancakes.

So, for my first real blog post, I wanted to lay out one theory of mine that I've been thinking of for a while. It isn't particularly controversial or insightful, but I think the conclusion is under appreciated: we live in one of the greatest periods of transition the world has ever known and the world is going to get messy by the time Aubrey de Grey's beard turns 100 (the benefit of having my own blog is that I can make obscure references with links so people can understand my jokes!). This might take a while, so I'll break it up into various posts. Also, excuse this first post- I know it is going to be very general but before I get technical you need to see where I'm coming from.

So. One of the most forceful drivers of human and societal progress is communication technology. While there is considerable controversy on this point with regard to whales and primates, so far as we know, language is unique to humanity. Language enables us to convey information to others, enabling its rapid acquisition and use among a broader range of people. The more information is spread, the more its validity can be tested, refined, and built upon. The more information is built up, the more it can be used for the advancement of whichever group has it. This goes all the way back to the earliest time of our species and why we established dominance in Eastern Africa: human children were able to draw on the knowledge of their parents and tribe, thus avoiding having to discover everything for oneself. There's no need to reinvent the wheel every generation if someone can just tell you how to make it. Language, the most basic form of communication also allowed advanced coordination among members, allowing tiny humans to hunt and kill giant mammoths or deadly saber-tooth tigers. Once we had language, we had a huge advantage over species that did not.

Writing was the next big advance in communication technology. Writing started from ancient Mesopotamians trying to facilitate trade and taxation. It turns out that scratching a symbol on clay to represent something in the world is a lot easier than having to carry around all your grain or animals to keep track of them all. With this came advanced coordination and information transmission because you didn't actually need the speaker to be right next to you in order to benefit from the information they were trying to convey. Carl Sagan described just how awesome this was:

“Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of magic.” - Carl Sagan

Hammurabi's Code was Great. His chair looked uncomfortable. 

Now along with writing came the first civilizations. Hammurabi's Code is the first example we have of a society deciding they're going to live by more-or-less stable rules that everyone can point to. This stability enabled even more coordination in the form of trade and the benefits of specialization that come with increased trade (Plato pointed this out way before Adam Smith ever did) which in turn freed up resources for military and the first empire building.

At this point, history speeds up. Humanity existed as hunter-gatherer tribes for hundreds of thousands of years without much advancement because you were limited to what knowledge you could get from your tribe. Hammurabi's code is dated to a mere 4000-ish years ago. Once you have increased communication spread, you can go much faster.

You could write entire books on this subject, so I'll speed things up by going briefly how communication technology (tied with ability to project power) built some of the more major empires. Keep in mind this is all ridiculously simplistic, but it helps understand where things are going. So after the ancient empires, the next empire-model is the Roman one. Rome was unique for both its extent and duration. A part of why it was able to get so big for so long is because they were able to move troops, goods, and information faster than anyone else. Why? After the Punic Wars they dominated the Mediterranean allowing their ships to reach any part of their empire pretty quickly and they built an extensive road network to get troops and messengers anywhere faster than their enemies could. After the Romans came the dark ages where communication became restricted and trade destabilized, with only monasteries acting as repositories of human knowledge. The first massive empire after Rome was really the Mongols. How did they do it? They were a society of horsemen who could move and strike faster than just about any army until mechanization. Once they took over, their harsh punishments for crime enabled safe passage, making the Silk Road safe to travel on from end to end for the first time. (I highly recommend "Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World" by Jack Weatherford for insight into this. Keep in mind, this is a pretty revisionist history- for those interested in a more balanced depiction of the Mongols, listen to Dan Carlin's excellent podcasts on the subject). The largest empire ever- the British empire- was able to exist because they controlled the oceans and could send their fleets anywhere in the world faster than anyone else.

Now, empires were built because of power projection which used the same avenues as information transmission; messengers carrying orders also carried treatises on philosophy and math. But what really destabilized the world was the mass expansion of information that came with the printing press. Again, whole books have been written on the subject so I can't do it justice here. But think of this... the printing press comes out and suddenly people are no longer reliant on the clergy to get their spiritual direction. This leads to Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation along with their war cry of "Sola Scriptura!" This broke the power of the gate keepers of information and lead to a general decrease in the power of authority. Time and time again, the more people had information and could utilize it, the less power elites in society had over others. Once you can intelligently question those in power, that power is broken (just read the writings of the man with the sweetest hair in history: Frederick Douglass). This premise is built into the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution- free speech and a free press enables an informed citizenry which can produce better results in terms of leaders and policy preferences.

The Hair With the Stare.

So, where am I going with this? The internet and why the old world and way of doing things is over. In the next couple posts I'll get more in to that, but I also want to analyze this theory through the lens of mathematical information theory and application to crowds which will be a post unto itself. I also plan on going over modern tools of data analysis and communication technologies that can change the world and I want to connect this to developments in evolutionary programming. And this is all only with this one general subject and doesn't touch any other subjects I want to get to... I have a lot of writing to do.