Digitalis Rex (Chapter 2 - Connections)
Everyone is busy. I’m sure you’ve noticed.
I woke at Eleven. Head pounding from another hard night. He looked good, but had nothing behind his eyes, so I kicked him out hours ago after doing the deed. He’d served his function.
The room was a bombsite, last night's clothes strewn at random with pages of notes on the wooden floor. Stacks of books, two fingers of Jim Beam in the bottle on my nightstand, the shot glasses serving as ashtrays, coke dust on a battered credit card. My life a cliche of the 1950s pulp I lost myself in. An endless cycle of work, drink, fuck, sleep, repeat.
Another perfect day in paradise.
It had been a couple of weeks since the moon landing. Sputnik had teased me into a rabbit hole but now I couldn’t get out.
The Network Control Program developed during the 1960s to control the flow of data across a network had a problem. Business 101 is first to create demand, then scale, but before you scale, you have to design the scalability.
In 1972, ARPA, the Advanced Research Projects Agency, was renamed DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and by that time had become the leading department developing technology for the US Military.
I learned the method outsourced by DARPA was ingenious. They democratised the process by allowing anyone to put forward a design or an upgrade, which was voted on by committee.
A democratic process for designing systems for the US military. I’d laugh my ass off on that one, except it’s real. Layer upon layer of organisations and sub-committees had head fucked me into a corner. The IETF, IESG, IRTF, and IRSG. Really. And I’m just getting started.
By 1983, this network of democratised geeks doing the heavy lifting on behalf of the US Government had transformed the Network Control Program into a fully scalable suite of rules that could in theory carry unlimited amounts of traffic. Unlimited that is to a 1980s mind.
They called it TCP/IP. Transmission Control Protocol / Internet Protocol. You’ve gotta love the geeks. Naïve fuckwits, yes. But driven ─ I’ll give them that.
I’d spent many hours listening to my grandfather’s stories. He was an old man, well into his eighties, but I’ve never known anyone with so much energy. I remember he used to balance the yardstick on his nose and clown around. He’d vault over the back gate, and god forbid you got into his car. He was a man of his time, an old-timer for sure, and I often wonder what he’d think of how it all turned out. I miss him.
In World War II, he flew the P-51 Mustang. The P-51 was considered a failure, that is until they paired it with the Rolls-Royce Merlin engine. Then it became known as the plane that won the war.
New technology needs motivation to be invented, he used to say. The Wright brothers drove themselves to solve our oldest dream, to be able to fly, but for years afterwards, they were a sideshow, a spectacle. Entertainment for the masses — until war broke out in 1914.
Sponsored competition is used to motivate innovation and new ideas. The Schneider Trophy air race, held between 1913 and 1931, was used to develop new innovations in technology. The star of the show was the Supermarine S6. Remove the floats and replace them with a retractable undercarriage, and you turn the S6 into something else.
They called it the Spitfire.
My Grandfather flew it on a few sorties. He told me the story, explained it like it was alive and had a soul like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. In truth, behind the purr of the liquid-cooled v12 Merlin, it was a killing machine.
But I didn’t care. He made it magical.
New waves of technology unfold slowly, from the Network Control Program’s development during the 1960s, outsourced to academia, to the first text message sent between UCLA and Stanford in 1969, from the beginning of the mass market personal home computing boom during the 1970s, to the renaming of NCP to TCP/IP and its standardisation and adoption as the dominant computer network protocol in 1983, waves connected across time.
Connections are easy to see in hindsight with the benefit of time speeded up, but it’s orders of magnitude more difficult to figure out the future while stuck in the present.
An invisible fabric stretches across what we experience as time. If only you can follow it. The best you can expect is a temporary ride. Enjoy the clarity while you can, cause it never lasts.
In the 1620s, Samuel Packard Sr, an Englishman, driven by the Great Puritan Migration sailed to the New World and settled in Massachusetts. 320 years later the Americanised Rolls-Royce Merlin engine that powered my Grandfather's P-51 fighter was made under license by Packard Motor Car Company in 1941 in Detroit.
Two years earlier, another relative of Samuel Packard Sr, a graduate electrical engineer from Stanford University, founded a new company with his friend.
Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard called their new company Hewlett Packard, smart as fuck those two, if a little light on imagination, they set up shop in a one-car garage, in a small little town surrounded by fruit orchards. The sign on the side of the road said Palo Alto, but today, you know it by another name: Silicon Valley.
Down to the kitchen for breakfast. Coffee and a cigarette. After a shower, I made my way down Washington Boulevard, and as I walked, memories served images from the unstructured metadata forming connections deep inside the plasticity of my mind.
A CAUSE B DO C. From ARPA to DARPA, to TCP/IP via NCP. My Grandfather. P-51. Spitfire. License agreements. Puritans. Packard Motors, Hewlett Packard. Silicon Valley. A machine with a soul. Stanford. All connected. Like Ouroboros eating herself.
Once DARPA had a scalable network, tested during the 1980s by connecting personal computers to mainframes, the stage was set for the introduction of demand.
For mass market adoption, computer networks needed to be moron proof. Point and Click simple. In 1989, Tim Berners Lee, working at CERN, invented the killer app for mass market home network computing, which for the first time allowed someone with zero skills to use and send data over a computer network.
They launched Mosaic in 1993, a new type of mass market software they called a web browser.
And you know what happened next.
It was still early afternoon by the time I got to Venice. There’s a cafe at the beach, a cafe might be pushing it, more of a shack that serves food. I was meeting a friend.
The side of the cafe was open onto the street. I was sitting at a table under the awning, people watching and lost in thought, captivated by a street artist, and didn’t see David walk in.
David: Hey, he said, tapping me on the shoulder.
Rey: I nodded and smiled. Good to see you, it’s been a while. Hang on. Gimme one minute. I got up from the table and walked out onto the street.
I stood a couple of feet back watching at an angle, the slabs of colour, more Gauguin, not Matisse, and exquisite heavy brush work. It was so beautiful it made me want to cry. The artist, hidden under a twenty-gallon straw hat, carried on, deliberate, lost in his creation.
Rey: How much?
Artist: It’s not for sale.
Rey: Everything’s for sale. How much?
I looked down at the pavement. He was barefoot, wearing a pair of stained chinos that had never seen the inside of a washing machine, and a black T that curled up his back.
Some say LA is fucked up. Uptight bean counters will struggle for sure, but for artists, writers, and dropouts, and I am definitely one of the latter, it’s a magnetic force. You can’t reckon with it.
Rey: I’m sitting over there. Let me know when you’re done. I’ll wait. I love your work ─ and I’ll pay cash.
He nodded without looking.
David smiled as I walked back to the table.
David: You’ve not changed.
Rey: Tell me what happened after 9/11.
David: Wow, same old Rey. Straight shooter, all business.
David was ex-Google tech, a mathematician turned entrepreneur. We were both at Stanford, just not at the same time. The GooG headhunted him after he lost the Peter Thiel Fellowship award in 2014. Beaten by a skinny kid, a 21st Century SteamPunk, who went on to develop a new type of network. Vitalik called his network Ethereum, replacing the steam-powered machinery, clockwork gears, and brass pistons with the digital gas he invented to run it. A decentralised solution that neutralised a world running out of trust.
David: What’s good here?
Rey: Pretty much everything.
David nodded to the waitress.
David: What are you having?
Rey: Jesus, David. You know I live on coffee and cigarettes. I’m having the fish sandwich ─ with the homemade bread. It’s roasted, not fried. It comes with a jacked-up tartar sauce and cabbage slaw, but it’s my treat. I asked you to come.
I ordered our food along with a couple of glasses of Sauvignon Blanc.
Rey: Is it true?
David looked around.
David: Keep your voice down.
Rey: Is it true?
David: Look Rey. Yes. It’s true.
Rey: Just give me the outline. But let’s keep this off the books and off the internet. Face to face only.
David: You’re right to be paranoid, Rey. After the September 11th attacks, DARPA began working with the CIA.
Rey: You’re talking pre-crime.
David: They named it TIA, or Total Information Awareness.
Rey: Fuck. It reminds me of Philip K Dick’s Minority Report. Guilty before the event. Are you saying the CIA looked at using pre-cogs? That’s 1950s pulp science fiction bullshit.
David: Truth is stranger than fiction. It’s already happened. Remember January 6th. There was this guy out of Florida, from Tallahassee. He jumped on Facebook and created a page inciting an armed counter-rally. It didn’t take long for the FBI to come knocking. It was one of the first, if not the first, pre-crime arrest.
Rey: And this sets up a precedent.
The waitress came over with the wine. David looked at me. I know that look. He was regretting meeting up.
David: Do you remember Oliver North in the Iran-Contra affair?
Rey: The illegal arms transactions.
David: Yes. The Reagan administration secretly sold weapons to Iran to free American hostages held in Lebanon. The money from the Iran weapons sale was then used to fund the Contras, guerrilla fighters opposing Nicaragua's Marxist government. Both arms sales to Iran and aid to the Contras were illegal. North and ex-Reagan National Security Advisor John Poindexter were arrested on various charges, but Poindexter was the only one who did any time.
Rey: Connections. How does the Iran-Contra Affair connect with pre-crime?
David: While North and Poindexter were busy selling arms to Iran, they were also doing something else─
Rey: They set up a database, didn't they?
David: Smart, Rey. Smart.
Rey: Sons of bitches. So, while they were getting hauled over the coals, the public kept happy by throwing North and Poindexter under the bus, it was a cover for the real mission, which was to set up a database of dissidents and troublemakers.
David: You nailed it.
Rey: And that database could be used to lobby congress, especially when timed with a crisis.
David: Keep going, Rey. Follow your instincts.
Rey: NCP, Network Control Program was renamed TCP/IP to hide its intent. And so...
The waitress came back with the food, cutting me off mid thought.
David: And so, you need a protocol, or a set of rules should the government of the United States come under threat. Let’s call them COG, Continuity of Government.
Rey: And that’s what the Iran-Contra list was for. You begin by adding all known and potential threats. And you keep going.
David: You keep going. Attend a protest, you’re on the list. Don’t pay your taxes, you’re on the list. That’s how it begins. And it’s not long before it gets more granular, more defined, and with a precedent set, it’s anything goes.
Rey: Oh my god. They wanted the power to data-mine the entire US population.
David: In 2003, the TIA program met with massive pushback after the media leaked it to the public. Americans were just not ready to give up their privacy, even after 9/11. Use your training, Rey.
Rey: Invert. They changed the name, didn't they?
David: TIA, the Total Information Awareness program became TIA the Terrorist Information Awareness program. It’s good to see you Rey, but...
David looked around, leaned in close, and lowered his head.
David: This isn’t smart. You’ve got sight of the rabbit, and you could go deeper into the rabbit hole, but I wouldn’t. You won’t like what you find.
I didn’t answer. We finished eating and dropped back to reminiscing. He looked distracted. It was good to see him again, but I had what I needed.
Rey: Are you ready?
I looked over at the waitress and nodded for the bill.
Rey: It’s my treat. Thanks, and great to see you.
He got up from the table and gave me a hug.
David: Be careful Rey. Don’t be you.
He walked out of the cafe and turned left up Washington Boulevard. I watched him until he was lost in the crowd.
I set the cash for the meal under the leather bill hold and walked back over to the street artist.
Rey: Looks good. I’ll give you $200 for it.
The artist looked at me. He had this lined, sun-bleached face, lines so deep he looked like he’d smoked forty a day since he was fourteen years old.
Artist: I was thinking more like $100.
Rey: I’ll give you $200.
Artist: Suit yourself. He smiled, unhooked the painting from the wooden clips and set it down on the pavement. It’ll be dry in an hour.
I walked north along the Venice boardwalk towards Santa Monica. In the window at Pacific books, they were promoting a new novel, so with my painting under my arm, I cut against the grain of foot traffic and into the store. I leaned the painting against the bookshelf, picked up the book, turned it over and read the back matter. The story was set in the near future, twenty years after a nuclear war between America and China. The illustrious careers of both authors, reduced to bullet points.
You can tell a lot by doing a little. Read the front and back cover, the front and back flap, the contents and the chapter headings; then, ask what each chapter is trying to say. It’s an 80:20 thing.
I opened the book and flipped to the beginning. A Prologue.
It read:
03:17, March 5th, 2051 (GMT-5)
IP Address: 78.878.826.69
I was jolted out of a suspension of disbelief.
Most won’t see it. The problem. But it’s there right in your face.
An IPv4 address has 32-bits, split over four octets. Each octet is eight bits. So, riddle me this: How do you squeeze a decimal number greater than 255 into the second and third octet position?
You can’t. For 878 and 826, you need ten bits, but you’ve only got eight. It’s a fuckup.
Details matter. And right there in my hands was an example of a world that no longer worked. Overcomplicated disparate systems, too many square pegs that do not fit into round holes. Book editors’ fuss over run-on sentences, nominalisation, and overuse of verbing, but you can probably count on one hand the number of editors that know you need at least ten bits for a decimal number over 511.
David’s experience at Stanford mirrored my own. We were both outsiders, two electrons who gravitate away from the nucleus. Everyone was signing up for this class. I always thought it was weird. The guy running it had a messiah complex. It began when David was a sophomore, but by my time there anyone who was anyone took this class. Not just coders. The CEOs of companies in Silicon Valley. The future designers of the world you think you live in. They were all there. Like disciples.
It reminded me of Stephen King’s Children of the Corn, which is a story about a small town in Nebraska where the children are manipulated by an unseen malevolent, ‘he who walks behind the rows’, to murder all the adults, and bring in a successful harvest.
Today, using computer code and intertwining it with psychology to exploit human nature, you are the harvest. The geeks at Stanford had a name for it: Persuasive Technology.
When you're staring into your oblong, interacting, swiping your index finger in an endless scroll, like a magician performing a magic trick, leading you step by step through a series of moves designed to blind you by creating the illusion that you are in control, while in reality, at all times, your actions are being manipulated.
As Slavoj Žižek said, what you believe is reality is the trance you are in blocking your ability to see what you’re really eating. It’s when you believe you are free, when you’re living your best life, when you believe all this is nonsense and something you would never fall for because you’re too smart, it’s then, if you don’t realise you have been exploited and controlled more completely than you can ever imagine, you’ll remain trapped forever inside a dream designed to enslave you.
My reading experience destroyed, I closed the book, walked out onto the boardwalk and headed south towards Venice. The sun setting over my right shoulder, pink, orange, and purple, fizzling in the late afternoon, skateboarders and jugglers, Basquiesque figures intertwined in the fading light.
When you search for something on your mobile phone, you believe you are adding to your knowledge base, and while that, to some extent, might be true, something else is going on just beyond your conscious level of awareness.
You are being programmed.
I have a friend who knows more about seaweed than it’s healthy to know. An expert on the subject. PhD, and professoriate. And I asked him once, why seaweed? He looked at me and said two words: Jacques Cousteau. Think about that.
Now think about the persuasive technology course at Stanford. It was a Cambrian explosion. Thousands motivated to go out into the world — an army of people driven by their own Jacques fucking Cousteau moment. And they’re not picking seaweed off some seabed. They are changing your behaviour one click at a time.
There are only two businesses in the world that call their customers users. The drug dealing business and the app software development business. And technology will be much easier for you to understand if you think of app development companies as drug dealers.
Yeah. I know. I’m a cynical bitch.
I walked over to a low concrete wall and leaned my painting against it. I took the cigarette pack from my back pocket, pulled the lighter from my front pocket, lit the cigarette, sat down, and looked out into the tequila sky.
Every four to six weeks, the media bombards the public with a new 'big thing', a situation or problem that you either empathise with or you don't.
The big thing is reinforced with positive, virtue controlling messages. Support it, or you're made to feel like an outsider.
Gaza, Ukraine, inflation, cost of living, supply chains, climate change, election. These are the things you are currently hearing about every day, traversing from news cycle to news cycle, non-stop, all day, every day. Disseminated by the media in a never-ending Nam-Shub.
What the fuck is a nam-shub? The public has been, are being, continually nam-shubbed. They’re lost in a trance. A nam-shub is a story told in an incantation. Its origins are Sumerian, an ancient civilisation from what is now Iraq. Sumer is old, dating back 1,000 years before the Pharaonic Egyptian age, meaning nam-shubs, stories and incantations were told to the masses 6,500 years ago.
Anyone who’s awake will realise that the nonstop 24/7 media news circus is an incantation.
The amount of data generated by the public is a runaway train. Right now, it’s 147 Zettabytes, but back in 2019, the Last Summer of Love, as the history books will recall, it was 47 Zettabytes. It’s already doubled once and by next year it will double again.
Most people, when presented with information like 147 Zettabytes, do not know how to process that, so their mind runs a built-in subroutine retrofitting the unfamiliar with what they already understand.
# Begin
# To them, a Zettabyte is just a thing. It’s a single thing. An object.
# Once their brains have sorted that, 197 doesn't sound like much,
# so they register then ignore.
def process_information():
zettabyte = "a thing" # A Zettabyte is just a thing
brain_sorting = True # Once their brains have sorted that
num = 197 # 197 doesn't sound like much
if brain_sorting:
print(f"To them, {zettabyte}.")
print(f"Once their brains have sorted that, {num} doesn't sound like much,")
print("so they register then ignore.")
process_information()
# End
A Zettabyte doesn't sound like a lot, except it is. It’s 2^70, or 1 sextillion 180 quintillion 591 quadrillion 620 trillion 717 billion 410 million.
And we are generating 147 of them this year, and about 181 next year. The constant bombardment of content delivered incantation-like ubiquitously is being disseminated via apps — apps designed with one purpose in mind.
To capture your attention.
Every swipe, like, tweet, and scroll has been designed to make your interaction with your oblong secrete dopamine into your system.
Dopamine is a neurotransmitter released by your hypothalamus gland. A part of your endocrine system, it's your reward centre, influencing many of your bodily functions, including your memory, movement, motivation, mood, and, critically, your attention.
You might think I've gone a little too far. Are app developers drug dealers? Really?
Yes, really.
And then it hit me.
A connection in my mind. Contact.
Marshall fucking McLuhan. The medium is the message.
I grabbed that rabbit by the ears, and I never let it go.
To be continued...
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Thanks John. I am captivated.
An excellent, interesting and fun follow-on from last week's piece. I look forward to the next edition.