Dynamic Hypocrisy

There are too many copies out there. There are too many Celine Dion CDs. There are too many re-posts of that cat photo. There are too many websites reporting the same story. There are too many places where I have to upload my updated resumes to. 

Let’s start with Celine Dion. In 1997, she sold over 15 million copies of “My Heart Will Go On.” Think about that. 15 million copies of that exact same sequence of bits and bytes was imprinted onto 15 million pieces of plastic, and hauled globally in trucks and ships just to entertain somebody for four minutes and 40 seconds.

In the world with YouTube, Spotify, rdio, and other internet streaming sites—that just simply seems ecologically devastating. A resource-intensive exercise just to know if Celine’s heart will go on or not.

As you may follow, even the notion that I listed more than one streaming option seems odd just to hear the same sequence of bits and bytes. I will give for remixes and covers. Those should be separate copies, no doubt. But at this point, shouldn’t we be moving towards one central location for certain song or photo or text? (This is not to say there shouldn’t be backups. Always backups.)

A central place to access that copy of human creation. We’re getting there. The internet is getting pretty good at coalescing, but it far from ideal. All the media and tech companies are fighting over 1.) who “owns” that central copy and 2.) who gets to gate-keep that copy. 

So we get awkward situations like Netflix vs. Amazon vs. Hulu vs. HBO Go vs. cable companies vs. god-knows-who-else. When the ultimate truth is that it’s Tuesday night, and we just want to watch the thing we’ve been meaning to watch. And couldn’t care less about who has distribution rights and licensing fees. 

In many ways, this process won’t be settled until we figure out the logistics of giving credit and getting the right people paid. But let’s save that for another day. Let’s just agree for today that there are too many damn copies of Celine Dion.

We celebrate the musicians, the artists, and the entrepreneurial coder because they are creative. They make things. We can see how the universe changes when creatives create.

What we take for granted are the maintainers and the destroyers.

We talk about the Apples and the Googles because they create sexy things to gawk at. But we get uneasy if we hear the financial institutions and law firms getting “creative.” 

And that’s because we need them to be stable. To maintain. 

On a smaller scales, we generally don’t need plumbers to be “creative.” We don’t need toilets to get software updates, or be an artistic statement on the travesty of injustice. But rather we need our toilets to maintain a certain level of “toilet-ness” in its toilet-like ways. 

At the same time as creators keep creating, and maintainers keep maintaining—there comes a time to destroy cruft and decay and debris. Companies fold, institutions disband, nations fall. Destroyers remove burdens of the past, and the costs of the present allowing for re-inspection of what is needed. 

I used to scoff at the idea of becoming a plumber. Such a lowly job, I’d be bored out-of-my-mind I would imagine. But the reality is: I wouldn’t even make it past the application form. I suck too much at plumbing to even be considered a candidate. I’m not good enough.

Which means they’re talented in ways my brain doesn’t even really comprehend. And I have to give props to that. The ecosystem isn’t just creatives, but includes the maintainers and the destroyers. We end up working together in ways that are often invisible and incomprehensible to each other, but ultimately is necessary to sustain all of us. 

“This city is so crowded.”

To me that means different things whether that’s coming from a New Yorker or Des Moines, Iowan. But often when a person says that, they don’t explicitly state their context or perspective. Which makes so many things that humans say so fuzzy. 

Usually I think about this notion in its own context. But today, I’m thinking about it because I’m reading an article on headphones and “sound quality.” 

Current implementable technology will naturally hit its ceiling when we start augmenting sound reception between the ear drum and brain. You can imagine the theoretical limit of perfect sound input to the brain without loss of fidelity.

However, the sound still wouldn’t be perfect. Reception will be perfect, but perception will still be a crapshoot. The next layer of technology will be modifying contextual memories and emotional resonances to match the tenor and timbre of any given song.  

A party pop-dance song “sucks” up until you’re at a party where you want to dance. But no set of speakers, or 256-bit encoding, or algorithmically-generated playlist can consistently get you in that mindset.

It’ll be a tiny microchip that will sit in your limbic system that starts playing an algorithmically-generated playlist of neurotransmitters and hormones synchronized with the 4/4 bass drops and snare drums. Much more precise than anything MDMA, cocaine, or that beautiful person on the dance floor could ever do. 

Well, the last one might give it a run for its money, but we’ll fix that in the version two release

I’ve spent more time in the cereal aisle than I have in any other part of the grocery store. I don’t even eat that much cereal. But when I get the craving, I head to that aisle, and then I stand there. People come and go. Cheerios, Raisin Bran, Shredded Wheat…such simple affairs for non-Phong people.

I, on the other hand, stare at every box. I think about childhood memories, what my mornings would look like with Cookie Crisp versus Honey Bunches of Oats, the snackability of each cereal during non-milk scenarios. Granola, nuts, sugar content, crunchiness, all considered.

Why? Because I love no-lose situations. Either way, I go home with cereal that I can put into my mouth. Worst case, if I don’t really don’t like the cereal, I can still crush them into a pie crust. Think about that, the worst possible outcome still results in pie. 

I also love to bring this up when a friend is having fork-in-the-road career issues. Because generally (I admit some odd-duck friends skew the percentage) these people are making hard choices between two-three great options. 

“I don’t know, Phong, I’m not sure to do the non-profit route or continue down education…”

“I don’t know, Phong, I want to start this after-school program, but creating art is also very important to me.”

All cereal aisle decisions. 

It’s not like they’re choosing between one career or heroin. That’s a bacon/turkey bacon decision. Always pick pig bacon. What the hell are you doing with your life choosing turkey bacon? 

Jesus.

One of the major phases of life for a chronic over-thinker is that reckless phase when you’re over-thinking, but you don’t know how to direct those energies. It reminds me of the comic book superhero, Cyclops. His “mutant power” is that red lasers shoot from his eyes; destroying everything in its path. Later in his life, he gets a ruby-red visor magically that lets him control his eye lasers, but before someone invented said visor — Cyclops would just constantly shoot lasers at whatever he looked at.

That’s what a young over-thinker does. They just start over-thinking at whatever they’re looking at. Homework assignments, the attractive cash register clerk, the cereal aisle, everything. Unfortunately, over-thinkers don’t get a magic visor to control it. You just have to keep working at focusing onto the right tasks and moments, and shutting it off the rest of the time. 

Some days, it’s exhausting to keep reminding yourself to “Hey, shut up. You’re at a beach. Sit there,” or “Hey, it’s fucking cereal. One has almonds, the other doesn’t. It’s okay.”

But it’s what we over-thinkers have to do. Every day, every hour. To the new over-thinkers out there, please don’t eye-laser the innocents. Eye-laser responsibly.

Sometimes I dream about New York City. Not for its food, or for its nightlife. But I dream about meeting all the neurotic mid-twenties, and spending hours deconstructing and musing philosophically over relationships, careers, and life in-general. 

I’m a chronic over-thinker. 

For the most part, it’s actually been great. Turns out the nascent field of web design and development is ripe for introspection. The printed book, over the centuries, has basically evolved into the perfect hand-held and hand-molded medium. The web though still has a ways to go before it fits just right. 

However, outside of work, my over-thinking ways gets me in trouble. I jump to weird angles in conversations, I fidget during dates, and I debate trusting the GPS as the turn approaches in 2 miles… 1 mile… 500 feet… Missed turn, GPS re-routing.

And recently while talking to my also-over-thinking best friend, I realized something even more insidious. The brain of an over-thinker works by imagining all the possible scenarios, outcomes, and universes. Which means each decision is played out within each slightly differing universe until we pick the “ideal” one. 

The problem is that each universe that differs slightly also differs slightly in consequences and metrics for success. Which means for an over-thinker on a bad day, we suffer through all the painful emotions of failure through an infinity of universes before we even start making a decision. It can be absolutely paralyzing.

I’ve gotten better at avoiding those days after years of working on it. Each experience generally informs the next, and I can move quicker through the progressions. Even dismiss the process every once-in-awhile. But it’s an on-going fight. It’s really really hard to stop your neurons from firing sometimes. But I’ve been doing a decent job, and having an overall better life because of it.

Well, I think at least…

I promise to be your everything.

I promise to be your husband. Your true love. Your shoulder to cry on. Your partner-in-crime. Your thrill. Your passion. Your shield.

Your rock. Your lake. 

Your cousin… Father figure?

Your turtle. Definitely your turtle.

Everything. 

Smart watches, Google Glass, and fitness tracker bands are already transitionary technology. The range of human functions range widely and diversely, while these devices are limited in data delivery and very sparse in data collection. Which means they’re ultimately too niche to overcome the perceived intrusion. 

I like to joke that all technology is a privacy issue until it helps you find parking. The persistence of these devices’ presence for the little utility it delivers doesn’t fit the cost-benefit ratio. 

Implantables, however, can provide a ton of utility for the ultimate invasiveness. The first generation will probably fail (and implicitly, this generation of this pre-implantable phase.) But I’ll bet the calculation will change once the first adult generation start having children. The explicit value of tracking–not just of the children themselves, but rather the tracking of viruses, disease, allergies, diabetes will win over parents. And even basic vitals will refine athletics allowing personalized coursework and true optimal exercise and diet.

You can then imagine the second generation of implantables when:

1. The children growing up with implantables will normalize the behavior. 
2. The implantables interface with brain chemistry and signaling. 

Then you get a world with true preventive health care, robust long-term diet planning with hard chemical stops and starts for hunger, controlled recreational drug dosing. At the same time, it’d be a true innovation on global disease spread control, real-time novel virus detection — the first marked innovation since the advent of vaccines. 

Wearables will be important with introduction of technology augmentation, but implantables is the where cultural and biological advancement will ultimately be.

The Associated Press (AP) is one of the major innovations of the 19th century. It consolidated the titanic task of gathering news and events, and allowed for the many disparate newspapers and outlets effectively dispense information. However, in-light of the internet in the past decades, the AP and publishing as an industry is facing an inflection point. 

The newspaper used to be the vehicle for a mass distribution of 1.) news events, but also 2.) journalistic interpretation. Both were expensive to do, but at least the first was simpler. And yet more tangibly of value to its consumers. Knowing about a large fire, or great crime, or even local gossip was valuable to readers. Or at least worth buying a daily newspaper for. And because publishing was one monolithic structure, it could use the immediate value of the former to finance the latter. 

Meaning a newspaper could afford to send a journalist and a photographer to cover a story for months or years. Because some stories required months or years to fully realize.

The internet has collapsed the perceived value of news event coverage. It will always beat any publisher in distribution, speed, and reach as it leverages the zero cost of copy-and-pasting and posting. 

The tension now is not about the “destruction of the publishing industry” or “the masses unwilling to pay for services.” But rather that there is still a need for journalistic interpretation, and deep slow investigative coverage. The gap is now how to finance something that is inherently expensive and inherently risky with a consuming public that may not inherently know that it’s expensive and risky to do.

Today we’re going to play with numbers.

First up is four. Four is the number of months since I’ve been musing on this thought experiment. I usually keep one or two questions floating in my head at any given time. I like to think about them when I’m driving, or showering, or in-between the pauses in a conversation. Which makes me a terrible conversationalist, but an above average thinkerist.

Anyways, as of four months ago in 2013, there were 1.4 billion smartphones out there in use. Or roughly, one in five people in the entire world had a smarty-pants phone device.

Which made me think, man, back in Issac Newton’s time (yes, that’s where my brain goes first) back in his time — there were like zero phones. In 1665, there were zero…phones. All’s well, I suppose, Issac was fairly busy formulating calculus at that point. Now calculus fascinates me. I learned it in high school, but I was never good at it. But it fascinated me.

Because all the branches of math up until that point were fairly routine. Arithmetic, 1 + 1 = 2, 2 + 2 = 4. Makes sense. Geometry has all those shapes and pi r squared and whatnots. Algebra is a bit more interesting with variables. 3x = y where x = 5, 6, a thousand. Or something like 60x = y would be something comparable to your speed on the highway. 60 miles for every X hours means you could travel y amount of distance.

Calculus is special though. It took what algebra started and elevated the complexity. It wasn’t just one variable being set and calculated, but now it was many many variables changing all at once.

Whereas 60 miles per hour is simply a rate of speed. Calculus could ask the question what if the rate of speed also going up or down over time? It was closer to real life, nothing really constant (also like real life), but still could account for you at given moment.

That was the brillance behind Issac’s work. He found the relationship between many changing variables. And that’s a big deal. Because beyond just Issac, beyond just math, this was the first time that humanity gained the ability to quantify a moment.

Keep that in-mind while my mind now wanders to 1139. It’s the beginning of the Middle Ages. 700 years after the fall of the Roman Empire.

And let’s pretend we’re a well to-do scholar in Western Europe. And one morning as you wake up, you get the idea, “I want to know more about apples.” Well, to our modern times — we would just Google search it, right? But we can’t, we’re in 1139. Not only is there no computers, but there aren’t really even books. Not ones that aren’t the Bible at least. Because in 1139, we’re 300 years too early for Gutenberg. No printing press. No mass produced books.

And so to study apples, we have to set sail. Because also back in 1139, apples were still in Central Asia. So we as scholars, just to look an apple — we would have to travel 3,000 miles just too sneak a peek. Life of a scholar was hard back then.

Jumping to 1768.

1768 because we don’t need to dwell on Gutenberg, all the way back in 1439. Let’s just jump to a more exciting time of the eighteenth century. Why? Because the Encyclopædia Britannica was just published. Now say we’re still that scholar curious about apples. The Britannica would have you excited. Well, ish. Most likely you wouldn’t be able to afford it. But you might know someone in-town that is. And if they have it, you might be able to borrow it. And that’s a great advance. No longer do you have to sail 3,000 miles. But let’s say, the owner of said books lived ten miles away across town. That’s still a huge improvement. 3,000 to ten. That’s an alebraic rate of change of 300x over 600 years. Fantastic!

Which makes you curious again. If that was 300x over 600. I wonder what it’ll be like in another 600 years? Or heck just 200 years, you know? Well, a third less time means a third less change. 100x. And let’s see… a 100x change of ten miles is 1/10 of a mile or 528 feet.

Which seems reasonable. Books get cheaper. Probably a neighbor would have something on apples at this point.

But the funny thing is in 200 years, your neighbor does indeed get more books. But there’s something else. In 200 years, it’ll be roughly the 90s. And in 1991 — a little floppy disk was delivered to your mailbox. AOL Online. ’91 is a quirky year where the idea of internet inside your own house becomes a bit more common, a bit more normal-like.

So that glowing box that people sit 20 inches away from can now connect to the internet. 20 inches. Not 528 feet. 20 inches is 0. 0 0 0 3 miles. 3 ten/thousandths of a mile.

That’s a three magnitude difference. Remember earthquakes are measured in said magnitudes. Entire cities either fall or stand with a single change in magnitude. And this change was three of those.

Three whole magnitudes.

So that’s 1991. Exciting times, but I find myself wandering back to Issac’s. And I can’t help but to pretend what it would be like to be him. To be at Trinity College in Cambridge. To be living in the time of Decartes, Copernicus, and Kepler. These philosophers and scientists are making such incredible discoveries that almost every human that had lived up to that point spent entire lifetimes never even imagining what these researchers were proposing.

To be Issac. To have access to people making such discoveries. Not just that though. But to also have access to the college’s libraries and papers. Or what you essentially have is equivalent to sum total of human knowledge up to that point.

Just think of how rich your observations would be, or rather you do know — just look at Issac’s work. When every thought you had was backed with the sum total of both the past and of the present.

Keep that also in-mind too. The fantastic-ness of the inertia of discovery. Each one pushing forward the next.

But in 1810, someone wasn’t thinking about inertia. A little composer named Beethoven is in love. He just wrote “Fur Elise”. The classic story of a man with a band who writes a love song for a lady. Although we aren’t quite sure who the lady was. It could have been a mistranslation, and actually for a Therese, not Elise. Specifically, Therese Malfatti von Rohrenbach zu Dezza. Or could have been an actual Elisabeth. Possibly Elisabeth Rockel, or also known as the wife of Johan Nepomuk Hummel. Which is ultimately an awkward situation, but who cares? Beethoven was in love. 1810 was in love.

Meanwhile reversing back to 1602, and to be, 
or not to be, that is the question:
Whether ’tis Nobler in the mind to suffer 
The Slings and Arrows of outrageous Fortune, 
Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles,
And by opposing
end them:
to die,
to sleep No more;
and by a sleep,
to say we end The Heart-ache,
and the thousand Natural shocks That Flesh is heir to? 
‘Tis a consummation Devoutly to be wished.
To die to sleep,
To sleep, perchance to Dream;
Aye, there’s the rub,

1602 was the year Shakespeare wrote Hamlet. He puts our beloved hero/anti-hero in world beset with woe and tragedy, and captures the feeling of angst and confusion into fun little Danish romp on the stage.

Three centuries later in 1901 we find another creative genius. A Modernist painter called Picasso. During this time, he’s in his Blue Period. “Portrait of Angel Fernandez de Soto”, “Woman with Folded Arms”, “The Old Guitarist”, and several others.

Fairly easy to tell Picasso’s Blue Period because of, well… all of the blue he used. Those paintings were stark and melacholy. He was in this Blue Period for an entire three years up until 1904. What many might not know is that Picasso was blue himself. For in 1901, a close of friend of his committed suicide.

Picasso was beside himself. He went through many bouts of depression during these years. His feelings of loneliness and despair found its way to the canvas. His brush was his emotional manifestation.

So what do we have now? In 1810: love. 1602: angst. 1901: depression and grief.

These are articulations of great emotion. Great human emotion.
Captured in very profound ways.

And so fast fowarding to 2013. A whole century after these works. I wake up, and I go check facebook. At which point I see a friend has posted a status that reads, ahem,

“I want that trophy.

God help them if they don’t win that trophy… — 🙂 feeling pumped”

Now to compare that post with Picasso or Shakespeare, we could easily fall into the trap of disparaging the fall of society. The dumbification of our citizens.

But you would miss the more profound realization.

The realization that thoughts used to be expensive.

Only the rarified and privileged were allowed or rather even had the resources to capture their thoughts and feelings.

Just try to imagine all the people who lived their lives, had kids, tried to do good, tried to do bad, learned very hard lessons — all of those people from cavemen to carpenters to delivery boys whose entire experiences and even themselves are completely lost to the ether.

No matter how great their observation may have been, they don’t exist anymore.

Neither you, I, or even the great Issac Newton got access to them. Even back at Trinity College at the the peak of the Age of Enlightenment — we were working with an incomplete data set.

But now it’s incredibly inexpensive for someone to record their thoughts. But mind you, in this instance — inexpensive doesn’t mean less valuable.

Just look at the year 48. The city of Alexandria is under siege. And among the many victims is the great Library. One of the ancient world’s crowning achievements, it was humanity’s first internet. And it burned to the ground. It set us back centuries, and we’re still paying the price for it today. So let’s celebrate tweets and lists and emails because they are amazing fragile markers of our existence.

And with that we retutrn to the number four. So four months ago I started this thought experiment. And where my brain was at then was slightly in the future.

Wait.

I lied — it was slighlty in the past first. In the slight past, 2007, the iPhone is announced to the public.

Okay back to the slight future. 2014. Or really the holiday season of 2013, which is, you know, rounds up to 2014-ish.

My brain is six months in the future because that’s when Google Glass is released to the public. Now I really don’t care whether it’ll sell well or terribly. Or if people are horrified or thinks it’s stupid. Those things don’t really matter. What matters is that Glass will be out in the public’s hands.

The simple fact that it exists is why it’s interesting.

Because remember that apple tree?

Back in 1139, that apple tree was 3,000 miles away from you. You needed a boat to see it. And then in 1768, it was a just several miles away now. Remarkably closer but still a hike. 1991, whether you loved AOL or hated it, it still brought that apple tree within 20 inches of reach. And now remember how the iPhone was released in 2007? 16 years after AOL, Apple brings the smartphone to the cultural consciousness. Sure there was RAZRs and Nokias and Blackberries with their “web browsers”, but let’s be real: the iPhone was the watershed moment. And people hold their phones six inches away from their face.

That apple tree got 14 inches closer within 16 years.

And now we have Google Glass. Again, love it or hate it — what Glass has done is reduced that distance of six inches to two millimeters. 0.08 inches.

A six-fold reduction of distance in just six years.

Love it or hate it. We’re talking changes in magnititudes here.

And that was what I was thinking about four months ago. And I have been still thinking about this up to right now. In those four months, my brain time traveled once again — this time forward 100 years to 2114.

Why a century? Because 100 is a pretty number. Now let’s try to imagine the world in 100 years. We can even make really broad conservative assumptions about it. Let’s apply Hans Rosling’s theory on population growth. He gives a great TED talk on his thoughts. And he believes that any population, first-world or third-world, given enough security and stabilty — actually slows down their population growth. He predicts that we can reach a break-even point where the number of people dying is matched by the number of people being born.

And that we can stabilize that population at, around, nine billion. To keep the future easy, let’s just take that number.

So in 2114, we’ll be at nine billion from our current 7 billion. Which makes for 16 billion humans so far, right?

And nowadays roughly 55 million people die per year. So let’s say in the following 100 years, 5.5 billion people will be born and dead during that time.

So during this time jump, we will have roughly 21.5 billion people who will have lived. And then let’s not forget about the 107 billion or so people who have already lived up to this point, our present day.

Which means by 2114, we will had a cool 128 billion humans who would have existed in this little universe of ours.

Bringing back Google Glass. Glass during our present day is bringing that apple tree to a nice .08 inches away from our brains.

Now remember: 3,000 miles; 10 miles; 20 inches; 6 inches; 0.08 inches.

With that in-mind: no matter how wild or conservative your guess about the future is — you can say that robots will invade, or we all grow tenacles, or our population balloons to 60 trillion-zillion: the fact that the apple tree is, right now, already 0.08 inches away — you have to assume that in any future, that very same apple tree will be no less than zero inches from your brain.

It has to be inside your brain. Wild or conservative: it’ll be zero. Not .05 inches, .03 inches, or .001… it’ll be zero.

But realize, that means it’s not just the apple tree. But Hamlet, Picasso’s paintings, Beethoven’s Fur Elise. And all of your emails. And all of your photos. And Facebook. And Twitter.

And the newest library of Alexandria: the internet. The internet which has been filling up with everyone’s experiences, opinions, and emotions are going to be zero distance away from your own experiences, from your own opinions, and from your own emotions.

So you have to ask yourself:

What does it mean to be in a society like that? 
What does mean to make a discovery?
What does mean to be a student versus a teacher?
What does it mean to even be smart? 
How do you parse the sum total of everything?
How do you know someone?
How do you go to the movies together?
How do we even interact? 
Or date each other?
Or marry each other?
Or how do we act shy when all of our desires are now public?
What does mean to keep a secret? 
What stigmas will continue to exist?
What is empathy? 
It’s one thing to feel the emotions of another person, but what of 128 billion?
And how do you form morality?
What does racism or sexism look like when inside your own brain you have the stories every victim, but also every bully? 
And really, the ultimate question: what does it mean to be human?

What does it mean to be human when there’s 128 billion other people inside of you and everyone else’s head?

Who could you be? Who do you want to be?

Who?

Who are you?