A Ramble on Virtualized Selves and the Global Mind

I’ve been consuming a tremendous amount of information lately. Maybe too much. Some of it is focused on my own research interests but then there’s the daily/hourly webiverse immersion, constantly pinging Gmail & Twitter & Reddit & a suite of news ags ostensibly to check for direct correspondence or critical info but then so very easily sidelined into general browsing of all & sundry in the human datastream. Or at least the bit of it that I routinely consume. Relevancy is starting to be undermined by pure serendipity where I find myself burning cycles on all sorts of flotsam & ephemera.

So there’s this ongoing datavore consumption reinforced by an increased merging of my sense of self with the hive mind, relentlessly sharing things as if they’re somehow invalid or unverified without being uploaded to the consensus. I can feel this shift in myself driving the necessity of sharing, virtualizing my reality to somehow make it more real as witnessed by the masses. In my more wistful moments, I can glimpse this as an emergence of, or perhaps the early characterization & symptomology of, the Global Mind. In my more pragmatic and self-effacing moments, I see it as an addiction fed by little squirts of dopamine into the amygdaloid stew of my brain, keeping me from meaningfully and intentionally engaging with the real presence of my life, all flesh and blood and alive with sensation, seeking joy and warmth, stillness & silence.

The convergence of mobility and the cloud makes this relentless info-gorging so very easy and ever-present, each one of us active nodes connecting across networks to report status, pass links, share overheard’s and twitpics, ping other nodes and generally engage in this bizarrely transformative-yet-simple orchestration of distributed human processing. In the smart phone era, we’re all knowledge workers of some kind, crunching our lot of bits about this or that but always in some relational connection to others. For those with access to smart phones, being truly alone, being bored, being without task, is something you have to deliberately seek out, unplug, leave the cellphone and the laptop at home, go to an island or desert or mountaintop that doesn’t formally recognize the cloud.

And maybe this gap is what Shirky is getting at with his new work on cognitive surplus (I haven’t read it yet) – that, for the first time in history, a considerable chunk of humanity is always available to be processors for some distributed task. You’ve always got the smartphone and it’s pretty much always wired so why not browse/share/crunch while standing in line at the DMV? This was impossible 15 years ago. That was time to read a book, maybe, but forget about being productive.

But what does it mean to be productive these days, anyway? Is tweeting in line at the DMV productive? I suppose it is if you’re contributing to someone else’s productivity by passing the info or sharing your insight.

And maybe this is why I like to imagine some socio-evolutionary acculturation or entrainment towards a global mind: because each of us are individual nodes in this monstrous global spaghetti of non-locality yet more and more we’re behaving as contributors to the multi-cellular efforts of our extended social nets, affinity groups, work projects, etc… We’re individuals embedded in large, non-local, instantaneously communicating virtual organelles, differentiating to address specific sets of tasks and goals, like functional bodies within the brain. And our nervous system seems wired to reinforce this through the immediate feedback of that heady stew of neurochemicals that bind reward and satisfaction and pleasure to the interactions that compose our social nature.

We are social animals. With smartphones. And a global repository of instantly read-writable living knowledge. And we’re rapidly adding a massive virtualized layer to our experience of each other and the world.

I’m painting a big romantic broad-stroke, of course, but it’s certainly a considerable trend in the nascent information age and one that has already radically altered the fabric of our lives. Timeshifted forward 50 years, barring any cataclysmic intervention by the biosphere or inability to bridge the energy gap when the tar pits dry up, we’ll see multiple generations that have grown up connected and virtualized. I mean, it feels weird to me and I can see it in myself but I’ve only been playing this web game seriously for about 17 years or so. Imagine the kids – and future adults – that have been embedded in this world since birth. What will the mind of the 40 year old in 2050 be like compared to mine? Kids these days don’t even speak on phones. They send short messages, small bursts of data, back and forth with blurring thumbspeed. Kids deal with online bullies that have no physical presence in their lives, can’t hit them or steal their lunch, yet are able to drive their targets to suicide. This is staggering. And it is evidence that the self is very quickly extending into the cloud yet seemingly incompetent at distinguishing it from reality.

Reality. Pish! It’s been a nebulous things for millenia, anyways. We tried to heap some mechanistic rationalism on it and it continues to routinely shrug it off. Reality has always been highly subjective and now it’s also virtual, augmented, more consensual than inescapable. More malleable than reliable. Especially so in the shifting sands before the doorstep of whatever grand event horizon our civilization seems to be presently, painfully, hurtling towards.