Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now (27 page)

This sort of observation provides a bit of comfort to those of us slow to warm to the fact that thinking is no longer a personal activity, but a collective one. Nothing’s personal—except maybe the devices through which we connect with the network. New ideas seem to emerge from a dozen places at once, a mysterious zeitgeist synchronicity until we realize that they are all aspects of the same idea, emerging from a single network of minds. Likewise, each human brain is itself a network of neurons, sharing tasks and functioning holographically and nonlocally. Thoughts don’t belong to any one cell any more than ideas belong to any one brain in the greater network of a connected human culture.

The anxiety of influence gives way to the acceptance of intimacy and shared credit. Many young people I encounter are already more than comfortable losing their privacy to social networks, preferring to see it as preparation for an even less private, almost telepathic future in which people know one another’s thoughts, anyway. In a networked ideascape, the ownership of an idea becomes as quaint and indefensible a notion as copyright or patents. Since ideas are built on the logic of others, there is no way to trace their independent origins. It’s all just access to the shared consciousness. Everything is everything. Acceptance of this premise feels communist or utopian; resistance feels like paranoia.

Regardless of whether this culture of connectivity will bring us to greater levels of innovation and prosperity, this culture is certainly upon us. Learning how to recognize and exploit patterns without falling into full-fledged fractalnoia will soon be a required survival skill for individuals, businesses, and even nations.

THE FEEDBACK LOOP: PARSING SCREECH

“That Tweet could be the beginning of the end,” the CEO told me, slowly closing his office door as if to mask the urgency of the situation from workers in cubicles outside. In less than 140 characters, a well-followed Tweeter was able to foist an attack on a corporation as disproportional and devastating as crashing a hijacked plane into an office tower.

The details of the scandal are unimportant. It turned out the Twitter-amplified attack on the company was actually initiated by the improper use of hashtags by the company’s own hired online publicity firm, anyway. But the speed with which error became a virus and then spread into a public relations nightmare covered by mainstream media was shocking. At least it was shocking to a CEO accustomed to the nice, slow pace of change of traditional media. Back then, a company would be asked for a comment, or a CEO could pick up the phone and talk to a few editors before a story went out. A smart PR firm could nip it in the bud.

Now there is no bud. Just pollen. Everywhere. It’s not merely a shift in the pace of media—as when things shifted from delivered print newspapers to broadcast TV—but in the direction of transmission. And even then, it’s more complex and chaotic then we may first suspect. To an imperiled politician or CEO, the entire world seems to have become the enemy. Everything is everything.

For many of us, this goes against intuition. We like to think having more connections makes us more resilient. Isn’t more friends a good thing? Yes, there is strength in networks—particularly grass-roots networks that grow naturally over time and enjoy many levels of mutual support. But all this connectedness can also make us
less
resilient.

In a globally connected economy, there is no such thing as an isolated crash. It used to be that the fall of one market meant another was going up. Now, because they are all connected, markets cannot fall alone. A collapse in one small European nation also takes down the many overseas banks that have leveraged its debt. There’s nowhere to invest that’s insulated from any other market’s problems. Likewise, thanks to the interconnectedness of our food supply and transportation networks, the outbreak of a disease on the poultry farms of China necessarily threatens to become a global pandemic. A connected world is like a table covered with loaded mousetraps. If one trap snaps, the rest of the table will follow in rapid, catastrophic succession. Like a fight between siblings in the back of the car on a family trip, it doesn’t matter who started it. Everybody is in it, now.

Along with most technology hopefuls of the twentieth century, I was one of the many pushing for more connectivity and openness as the millennium approached. It seemed the only answer for our collapsing, top-down society was for everyone and everything to network together and communicate better and more honestly. Instead of emulating a monarchy or a factory, our society could emulate a coral reef—where each organism and colony experiences itself as part of a greater entity. Some called it Gaia, others called it evolution, others called it the free market, and still others called it systems theory. Whatever the metaphor, a connected world would respond more rapidly and empathically to crises in remote regions, it would become more aware of threats to its well-being, and may actually become more cooperative as a whole. It seemed possible that a networked human society of this type may even have some thoughts or purpose of its own.

But the Earth reached its maximum state of openness, at least so far, on September 10, 2001. The next day, we learned how all this openness can be turned on its head, lending the explosive impact of jet liners and the population density of modern skyscrapers to a few guys armed with box cutters. That’s when the dream of a connected world revealed itself rather as the nightmare of a world vulnerable to network effects. Whether it’s a congressman losing his job over an errant Tweet, a State Department humiliated by the release of its cache of cables on WikiLeaks, or a corporation whose progressive consumers just learned their phones were assembled in Chinese sweatshops, connectedness has turned every glitch into a potentially mortal blow, every interactor into a potential slayer.

It may seem glib to equate a terrorist attack with a public relations snafu, but from the perspective of the institutions now under seemingly perpetual assault, it is the same challenge: how can they better respond to the crises emerging seemingly from anywhere and everywhere, all the time? How can they predict and avoid these crises in the first place? When everything is connected to everything else, where does this process even begin? Any action from anywhere may be the game changer—the butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil that leads to a hurricane in China. And all of it happening at the same time, because cause and effect seem to have merged into the same moment.

Welcome to the world of feedback and iteration, the cyclical processes on which fractals are based. In a normal situation, feedback is just the response you get from doing something. It’s the echo that comes back after you shout into a canyon, the quizzical looks on the faces of students after you tell them a new idea, or even the size of the harvest you get after trying a new fertilizer. You take an action and you get feedback. You then use this feedback to figure out how to adjust for the next time. You shoot an arrow; it lands to the left of the bull’s eye; you adjust by aiming farther to the right; and so on. Each time you adjust is another iteration of the feedback loop between you and the target.

For feedback to be useful there must be some interval between the thing you’ve done and the result you’ve created. You need time to see what happened and then adjust. In a presentist world, that feedback loop gets really tight. Feedback happens so fast that it becomes difficult even to gauge what’s happening. You know that feeling when you’re holding a microphone and the speakers suddenly
screech
, and you don’t know which way to move to make it stop? That’s actually feedback you’re dealing with and trying to control. Normally the microphone simply hears the sound of your voice and passes it on to the amplified speaker. When you get too close to one of those speakers, however, the microphone ends up listening to its own noise. Then that noise goes back through the amplifier and speaker, at which point the microphone hears it again, and sends it back on through—again, and again, and again. Each iteration amplifies the sound more and more, thousands of times, until you hear the combined, chaotic screech
of an infinite and instantaneous feedback loop. Only we don’t hear a cyclical loop; we just hear the high-pitched whine. That’s the way the world sounds right now to most governments and businesses. Everything becomes everything.

Fractals are really just a way of making sense of that screech. Deep inside that screech is the equivalent of one of those cyclical, seemingly repetitive Philip Glass orchestral compositions. We just don’t have the faculties to hear it. Computers, on the other hand, work fast enough that they have time to parse and iterate the equation. Like a kid drawing seemingly random circles with a Spirograph, computers track the subtle differences between each feedback loop as it comes around, until they have rendered the utterly beautiful tapestries that evoke coral reefs, forest floors, or sand dunes, which are themselves the products of cyclical iterations in the natural world.

The fractal is the beautiful, reassuring face of this otherwise terrifying beast of instantaneous feedback. It allows us to see the patterns underlying the seeming chaos, the cycles within the screechy collapsed feedback of our everything-all-at-once world.

Feedback used to be slow. A company might upgrade a product and put it out into the market, and wait a full season to see how it did. Feedback came in the form of inventory reports and returns. The way a product sold was the feedback a company needed to plan for the next season. In traditional politics, feedback came every few years through the voting booth. It eventually tightened to polls conducted weekly or even daily, but at least there was some control and sequence to the process: leak a policy, poll the public, then either announce it or not.

When feedback comes instantaneously and from all sides at once, it’s hard to know how people are reacting to what we are doing—or what we’re doing that they’re even reacting to. Social media lets people feed back their responses immediately and to one another instead of just back to the business or politician concerned. Then other people respond as much to those messages as they do to the product or policy. They are feeding back to one another. In a landscape with instantaneous lateral feedback, marginal box office on the opening night of a movie—even if it has nothing to do with the movie—ends up being Tweeted to the next day’s potential viewers. The negativity iterates, and the movie fails, even if it got good reviews from the traditional channels of feedback.

Businesses attempt to adjust in real time to the comments about their products emerging on bulletin boards, update feeds, or anywhere else, and often don’t even know whether the feedback is coming from someone who has seen or touched the actual product. Brand managers know they’re in a world where companies are expected to be present in all these venues, responding and adjusting, clarifying and placating—but it’s hard to do when everybody is talking at once, feeding back into one another and the product and the competition and the shareholders. Thanks to feedback and iteration, any single Tweet can mushroom into a cacophony. Ideation, corporate culture, development, production, branding, consumer research, and sales all become part of an iterative, circular equation where causes and effects can no longer be parsed. When feedback comes through the cycle in that uncontrollable way, it’s like putting that microphone next to the speaker amplifying its own signal. All you get is screech. You don’t know where to stand to make it stop. The speakers are everywhere. Everything is everything.

Traditional corporate communications don’t function in such an environment. Remember, corporations themselves were born to counteract the peer-to-peer, every-which-way connectivity of the bazaar. As we saw earlier, the corporate brand emerged as a stand-in for the community member who may have once provided the goods that are now being shipped in from some faraway place. The company doesn’t want us dwelling on the factories where our cookies are being made, especially when they could just as easily have been baked by a friend in town without the need for long-distance shipping or unhealthy preservatives. So instead of telling us the true story of the factory, the corporation tells us the story of how elves baked the cookies in a hollow tree. This is what is known as brand mythology; it was not developed to enhance the truth, but to replace it.

Now this all worked well enough in an age of print and broadcast media. Those media were themselves developed largely to promote this sequential, back-and-forth style of communication between corporations and their consumers. In fact, the whole notion of balanced reporting by newspapers—itself a mythological construct if ever there was one—emerged in response to the advertising needs of corporations, who did not want their ads appearing next to editorial copy that might alienate any potential customers. Television, similarly, served as little more than electronic wallpaper for advertising. Difficult ideas were left for the movies, PBS, and, later, HBO.

Until quite recently, companies enjoyed exclusive dominion over the vast majority of messaging that reached people. This allowed them to craft the stories they wanted to, control their dissemination through the media, and then respond to the orderly sales feedback or controlled sentiment studies. The rise of interactive technologies, which finally gave consumers a way to feed back directly to their screens in real time, encouraged many companies to begin thinking less in terms of story than in those of “conversation.”

As Kevin Roberts, CEO of the once colossal Saatchi & Saatchi, explained to me, “The consumer is now in total control.” He waxed sentimental as he described the new empowerment. “I mean she can go home, she’s going to decide when she buys, what she buys, where she buys, how she buys. . . . Oh, boy, they get it you know, they’re so empowered at every age. They are not cynical; they are completely empowered; they’re autonomous. All the fear is gone and all the control is passed over to the consumer. It’s a good thing.”
³

Many companies tried to take part in this conversation, under the impression that consumers really wanted to speak with them. What they failed to recognize is that consumers don’t want to speak with companies through social media; we want to speak with one another. We don’t even think of ourselves as consumers anymore, but as
people
. The great peer-to-peer conversation of the medieval bazaar, which was effectively shut down by the rise of corporate communications, is back. One advantage (or side effect, depending on your perspective) of being always-on is that we are never limited to just one role. Thanks to smart phones, we are available to our clients while vacationing with our family at the beach. We bid on eBay items from work and cruise for prospective mates from the safety of our own bedrooms. On social networks, we are at once consumer, producer, citizen, parent, and lover.