The Next Great Discontinuity

"To say writing is artificial is not to condemn it but to praise it. Like other artificial creations and indeed more than any other, it is utterly invaluable and indeed essential for the realization of fuller, interior human potentials. Technologies are not mere exterior aids but also interior transformations of consciousness and never more than when they affect the word." (Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy)

...Kilobytes were stored on floppydiscs. Megabytes were stored on hard discs. Petabytes are stored in the cloud. As we moved along that progression, we went from the folder analogy to the file cabinet analogy to the library analogy to - well, at petabytes we ran out of organizational analogies.

At the petabyte scale, information is not a matter of simply three-and-four dimensional taxonomy and order but of dimensionally agnostic statistics...

...Out with every theory of human behaviour from linguistics to sociology. Forget taxonomy, ontology and psychology. Who knows why people do what they do? The point is they do it, and we can track and measure it with unprecedented fidelity...

...In only a handful of years the human has gone from merely dipping into the database to becoming an active component in a human-cloud of data. The interface has begun to reflect back upon us, turning each of us into a node in a vast database bigger than any previous material object. Gone are the days when clusters of galaxies had to a catalogued by an expert and entered into a linear taxonomy. Now, the same job is done by the crowd and the interface, allowing a million galaxies to be catalogued by amateurs in the same time it would have taken a team of experts to classify a tiny percentage of the same amount.




...In the era of The Data Deluge science has become more cloud-like, as theories for everything from genetics to neuroscience, particle physics to cosmology, have shed their linear constraints. Instead of seeing life as a branching tree, scientists are now speaking of webs of life, where lineages can intersect and interact, where entire species are ecological systems in themselves. As well as seeing the mind as an emergent property of the material brain, neuroscience and philosophy have started to consider the mind as manifest in our extended, material environment. Science has exploded, and picking up the pieces will do no good...

...Through the topology of the network we have begun to perceive what Michel Serres calls, 'The World Object,' an ecology of interconnections and interactions that transcends and subsumes the causal links propounded by grapholectic culture. At the limits of science a new methodology is emerging at the level of the interface, where masses of data are mined and modelled by systems and/or crowds which themselves require no individual understanding to function efficiently. Where once we studied events and ideas in isolation we now devise ever more complex multi-dimensional ways for those events and ideas to interconnect: for data sources to swap inputs and output; for outsiders to become insiders...Thought has finally been freed from temporal constraint, allowing us to see the physical world, life, language and culture as multi-dimensional, fractal patterns..."

Thanks Space Collective!