Seeing Like a Network

Please check this seminal textbook on Networks by Mark Newman [1].

Now you can even query and process network graph data as you would with spreadsheet, relational database and matrices with associate algebra [2].

[1] Networks [2nd Edition]:

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/networks-97801988050...

[2] Mathematics of Big Data: Spreadsheets, Databases, Matrices and Graphs:

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262038393/mathematics-of-big-da...

"We’re stuck surrounded by the exhausts of the stories that pollute the epistemic commons and they together make up the much of the information sphere in which we live."

Published, sans irony, on Substack

Shades of David Brin, I think.

But as far as the models go: the map is not the territory.

> Which also means the culprit for the cultural malaise isn’t the algorithm as is so often said, it’s the network topology

Oh, it's definitely both!

Ad driven algorithmic content mediation adds layers of additional dysfunction.

How much worse is it to drown in information, when it is also heavily diluted with information designed to coerce us.

How much worse is it to share information, when our most reliable readers are surveillance machines prepping manipulation for us.

This has undermined the healthy flow of information for individuals and society on almost every major network.

It's not new, cf "media culture"

"Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which they communicate than by the content of the communication."

"Electric circuitry has overthrown the regime of "time" and "space" and pours upon us instantly and continuously the concerns of all other men."

"In an electric information environment, minority groups can no longer be contained-ignored. Too many people know too much about each other."

"We now live in a global village...a simultaneous happening. We are back in acoustic space. . . Electric circuitry profoundly involves men with one another. Information pours upon us, instantaneously and continuously. As soon as information is acquired, it is very rapidly replaced by still newer information. The world has forced us to move from the habit of data classification to the mode of pattern recognition."

The phase change has already been in full swing for 50+ years. From The Medium Is The Massage, 1967.

This is a fantastically written post by someone whose blog title tells me we'd be friends, but it's also perhaps the most absurd example of idealogical bias I've ever seen. In this case, the bias is towards individualism and contemporary American conservatism/liberalism. Like;

  The histogram for the sparse network shows a wider spread of "world knowledge" values. This range and the standard deviation indicate a more varied distribution of information among nodes. While in the dense network, the uniformity of colour suggests that almost all nodes have closer "world knowledge" values. Information spreads quickly and uniformly, leading to a more homogeneous knowledge distribution among all nodes.

Truth is good, my friends. They later describe this as leading to "echo chambers" and use some examples of fake news from the past to illustrate this, but I think this is entirely backwards. Echo chambers form in spare networks because that's, uh, that's what a chamber is. I won't go quote-by-quote because as I said above the analysis itself is good, but again and again they apply a biased worldview to end up focusing on the wrong results of that analysis. Probably the funniest quote is:

  In an era of unprecedented connectivity and access to information, we expected a renaissance of cultural innovation. Instead, we find ourselves in stasis, where the sheer volume of content has led to a paradoxical cultural gridlock.

Just because you don't like modern culture doesn't mean it's not "innovative". Even if we restrict the analysis to English speakers in "the west"-ish, public opinion on gender identity, sexual orientation, public healthcare, international relations, parental labor division, neurodivergence, and open world games have changed considerably. Just to name a few important topics off the top of my head ;) And if we're talking aesthetic cultural innovation, I really don't see a problem with the current internet other than "hollywood sucks" and "vine no longer exists"

I think half of this is well-reasoned and insightful but it commits a couple of enormous confounds when trying to explain the general sense of stagnation

One is the economic side of things. Like me, this author has a very US-centric view of things, and to be fair, much of the world often seems to. However, a crucial factor in the US economy now is inequality, concentration of power at the high end, and purchasing power and quality of life essentially rotting at the low end. The vast majority of people in the US do not give a single flying fuck about the GDP, and they are correct not to, it's become a useless metric for their purposes. Whatever the economists say about broad aggregates, a lot of people are struggling right now. The job market is chaotic and, for most jobs, less lucrative in real purchasing power. Even relatively educated younger people probably can't afford a house. Life expectancy has declined for the first time since we've been rigorously measuring it. Companies can just permanently and unilaterally raise the price of groceries or TV or crucial medicines because they operate as cartels. Your precarious job also provides your flimsy shield against the absolute nightmare that is ever dealing with the medical system. Even in the 2000s the average person could get bankrupted from a single medical emergency. But now that's still true except that's on top of more baseline precarity. A lot of this got muted by people being mezmerized by the density of the network increasing. Go to any living busy city and you will notice that happy people are not on their phones 24/7, but so many people are. You never meet those people IRL because of course you don't. I've met them. I seem a lot nicer in person. Some of the perma-online aren't as mean in person, but they also can't hold a conversation very well. Their life is online because that's what they can safely afford and do with their time. And as concentration of power has tried to squeeze more blood from a stone, as those goods and services we who touch grass also saw get shittier and more invasive and annoying, this further immiserated people for whom they were and still are more important

Also, destabilization of the world is real. There natural disasters at unprecedented scale every year. There are huge migrant crises that come from people fleeing natural disasters, wars that indirectly result as resources become more scarce, pogroms that follow the wars, and this in turn leads to populist nationalism that stokes bigotry and has significantly destabilized the actual governments of several countries

A lot of misery and paralysis are amplified by network effects as described in this paper. I'd even believe network density accounts for some of it on its own. But also, there is actual misery to be amplified at a pretty catastrophic scale right now for reasons that are not just because the internet. And moving to dense social medias concentrated by enormous corporate information-brokers is not some accident of history, those companies still make decisions that both maintain and exploit those network properties

A good mathematical shiny object is alluring because it's fun to reason about and math seems so powerful and it gets to have unambiguous truths that you can program about and so I think a lot of people find a mathematical model that looks explanatory and it dominates the picture for them. Maybe people are so upset because information propagates so fast and it's all a blur. And like, again I partially buy that. I've felt that. Also, I think some people dark forest because sometimes internet drama escalates and finds their house and sends swat teams there. Maybe we could sparsify our networks, but we are still cranking lots of voltage through lots of nodes and many of the connections are not just missing but badly frayed and kinda sparking out and flopping about on the street

Tower of Babel