tedx vienna - the post network, slides and text

7/24/2019 TEDx Vienna - The Post Network, Slides and Text

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Monday, November 2, 15

Hey everyone. Im gonna talk about invisible things. But not things that cant be seen, morelike things that, after youve been around them a lot, they BECOME invisible.


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Sorta like breathing. Were all, hopefully, doing it right now. And before I started talkingabout it, you werent thinking about it. Now that Ive brought it up you may be thinking aboutit a little too much and its getting to be a little weird, thinking about this thing you neverthink about. Because normally it just happens.


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Its a natural process and until some rando points it out, or until it becomes difficult or aproblem,you dont really give a thought. Going around our day to day lives, buying fruit,trying on shoes, paying bills, Im guessing most of us dont think about ... air, or oxygen, orbreathing. They are, in a certain respect and more than literally, INVISIBLE.


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This kinda thing happens to us a lot. And often with contexts, processes or situations thatare not as automatic or important as breathing. We become accustomed to things: thecharacteristics ofour surroundings, the beliefs of our peers, abundantly available resources,our own habits... Spending enough time in any particular context can habituate you to the

general features of that context until they seem unquestionable.


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Your environment, and ways of thinking about it, start to become natural, given or INVISIBLEeven though they have an active, perceivable presence. Its just that being conscious of thatpresence is often weird, or difficult. Uncomfortable or even just mildly inconvenient. And sowe let things fade into the background.

The invisible" thing I want to talk about here and now is NETWORKs:


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...groupings of unordered connections between many things that interact in many differentways. Eventually, I want to talk about a distant, perhaps alternate-universe future wheretheyre not as prevalent as they are now, but to do that I have to talk for a bit about theirpresent. And to do that: Im gonna share AN ANECDOTE.


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Because I hear thats what you do during your TEDx talk.

So: I was out with some friends a few months ago and during the course of our conversation,which involved more than its fair share of googling and checking wikipedia, image searches

and social media streams I realized we werent just talking about the internet, we were alsotalking with it.


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This, in and of itself, isnt much of a revelation. There's been no shortage of ink spilled andeven TED talks given on the perceived benefits and supposed detriments of the internetsleakage into our meat-space interactions.

And here I just want to pause to plead that everyone please stop perpetrating the internetversus real life dichotomy.


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!"#$%in real life


The internet is not the opposite of real life. The internet is, in fact, very much. Real. Life.And!A part of all our conversations. At least: for many if not most people, in this part of the world.Even if its as subtle background noise, or potential energy: its there! And for the record, andthe most part, I think thats GREAT. Im fine with it.


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So sitting with my friends I became hyperaware of this:


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that the internet has this very natural and mostly unquestioned place in our interactions withone another and the world around us.

And then, one friend said something. He said the network,


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in reference to the internet. Thats it. Just. The network. Meaning: the vast, globalinterconnected system of machines that comprise the technology which lets us google stuffand send emails and instagram all the sunsets or puppies. The Network. And everyone at thetable knew exactlywhat he meant.


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Now, this probably goes without saying but Im gonna say it anyway: theres more than onenetwork. Theres more than one kind of network.But the prevalence and usefulness of theinternet, and its related networking technology, has made it, in some sense, the PRE-EMINENT network; the paradigmatic network. The. Network.


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And, to a large degree, I think this has influenced the way we look at the world. Beyond allthe things we normally credit the internet with changingeducation, entertainment, history,science, the arts, social interactionmaybe it has also encouraged the growth of what wemight call NETWORK. VISION: the ability or willingness to perceive networks. Which, I think

there is at least anecdotal support for a claim that we do:


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Even outside of the context of facebook I consider my social network. I haven't and will.never. join. LinkedIn but I definitely think about my professional network as exactly that. Talkof the recent ebola outbreak was couched in language about the global transportationnetwork; environmental concerns are often described in terms of networked ecosystems; and

atrocities in the middle east are perpetrated by terrorist networks.


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The global economic collapse was the result of poorly managed financial networks. Arguablythe height of this is inChristopherVitales 2014 book Networkologies, which develops a kindof network ontology. Vitale moves beyond Cartesian Dualism


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!"#$ &' ()$*


...a separation of the mind and the body into two distinct entitiesby suggesting ourconsciousness, meat, and all the experiences which unite the two are, in fact,NETWORKED.That we, in our very being, are somehow networks.


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!"#$ & '($)

#*+,(-.Monday, November 2, 15

And I LOVE this idea. Im not saying that seeing the world as a network of networks isnecessarily detrimental. On the contrary! Network


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vision give us new perspectives on old problems; brings new consideration to familiarrelationships.Network theoryand its parent area-of-study, graph theoryhas developedmodels, techniques, and systems for dealing with massively complex systems.


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I am simply curious if the prevalence of the internet, and its prevalence AS A NETWORK hasmade the world more network-like? I think the answer is both yes and no.We could arguethat network vision has trained or allowed us to see things which have been there the wholetime... we just werent looking or couldn't.Take, for instance, a wolf


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!"#$# &' (#) *+," - "$$./00&1$23'0456&(78


and its surrounding environment. And all the other organisms in that environment. Seeingthese things as networked allows us to approach a complex, always shifting arrangement ofdisparate parts as a unified system with connections and boundaries that can be identifiedand studied.


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But its also worth considering how new technology is frequently used as a metaphor for ourexperience of the world. After the industrial revolution we began describing the machinery ofthe body, the telegraph influenced all kinds of communication about communication; In1633 Descartes wrote about how the reflexes of the mind work similarly to hydraulics, and

today we would tend to say our brains are like... computers.


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Now, while the wolf may or may not actually be networked in some sense, I get theimpression the word network


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in general, is used less of a thumbtackpinning down a single, particular thingand more likea sledgehammergetting the job done with minimal effort. Which is fine! and great! Meaningis complicated and we get at it however we can.


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Our relationships, and the relationships we perceive between things, have alwaysbeenelaborate and the network has become the metaphor of choice for doing the job ofexplaining those relationships with minimal effort.


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But where are the boundaries of this concept, and its meaning? Like, what do we callnetworks which are not, technically? Not because I want to go to parties and be all Well,actually but because the metaphors we use guide our thinking about whats possible.


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Theyre powerful stuff. And also: what do we call networks, and sure, maybe they arein factnetworks, but we should want them to be more than networks. We should want them tobe whatever comes after networks.


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Which bring us to the question we saved earlier for later, except NOW is later: what come afternetworks? Technologically, conceptually, metaphoricallyWill welike Descartes hydraulicsanalogyeventually look back upon our network metaphor and say Oof, really? Yikes!"Maybe not. But if so, what realizationor technologywill underscore how much nuance our

current metaphor lacks?


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Towards that end, I want to try to imaginesome speculative mode of interconnection thatmay eventually replaceor complementthe network. It would adopt some of networking'sfundamental characteristicsconnections, relationships, multiplicitybut eschew others.


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But which others? To answer this, we may ask what about a network could be viewed asshortcomings; how to remedy those shortcomings? This could be the gateway to our piece offantastically speculative alternate-universe interconnection: the post-network.

And so. Thats what were gonna do; were all gonna speculatetogether. So, if yourbloodsugar isnt too lowall I need you to dois imagine a network.


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Technological, social, biological, infrastructural, neurological. Something you know well. Andas we talk about network shortcomings, and post-network remediestry to imagine how yournetwork compares. Is it, definitionally, a network? Maybe not.


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But if so, how does it respond; being asked to do new, unfamiliar things? It may be able toadjust; it may not. You may end up confronted with pure nonsense. Which is something Imperfectly prepared for. Nonsense is a necessary byproduct of speculation.


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So. Well pause for a sec: [pause] Everyone got something? Awesome. Please come find meduring the breaks today and tell me how this thought experiment worked, if at all, forwhatever network youve settled on. Im really, super curious.

Ok. So. Network frictions. Were gonna talk about 3.

The first is that: Your network always wants to grow...


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...even if your network is private or exclusive it still requires growth, it's just kind of ajerk about it. This is the case because your networks is most powerful when it grows, becausenetworks amplify action. Your network doesnt act on its own, right? It allows whatever itconnects to take action, or amplify action. It's ability to do this is based on its size. Part of

how and why this works is that your network doesn't foreground


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...the individual characteristics of its nodesonly how those nodes operate in a largercontext.Like, when I send an email from Vienna to New York, thecharacteristics of theservers it passes through dont matter beyond their ability to perform that task. Yourprofessional network is more effective the more people who are in it and, as was

demonstrated by Mark Granovetter in 1973, youre more likely to find a job from the peopleyou know less well. Network size...


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has a greater effect than substance. The post-network may focus on a different kind ofstrength: not allowing action, but encouraging or inspiring it; not functioning despite theindividual characteristics of those comprising the network, but because of and in concert withthem.

Friction 2: Sociologist Bruno Latour said that network connections leave empty that which isnot connected.


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Whatever your network does not connect is empty; not background space butactualnothingness from the networks perspective. Spaces which dont enable your networkto act are useless, ignored. The post-network could attempt to cultivate connectivity wherethere is none.


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It could, somehow, address it's own phobia of non-networkable areas; if the post-networkencourages action maybe it encourages the creation of in-roads to this negative space.Thepost-network may be a true crisis-of-networks in that it allows us to suddenly realize, withgreat accuracy and urgency, what and where the network is, but most importantly: is not.


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Which brings us to the final network friction, in a list not meant to be exhaustive, onlyhopefully encouraging. And maybe a little confounding. Your network replaces the shape ofour world with its own. Networks dont map or sit on top of our geography, they ignore it tocreate their own shape uninterested in geographic, physicallocation. Networks possess

their own ever shifting...


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...indeterminate structure, which Christopher Vitale calls immanent: a shape which isalways, already emerging... as connections are made and broken and overall structures arereconfigured in maintenance of stability. Meaning:


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...nodes within your network can never be sure of their position. A constantly shiftingstructure means theres no location in a network; only a kind of motion around it. Nodes donot, and cannot, know where they stand within your network; this information is bothunimportant, and impossible. Even though the network envelops them, is all around them, it

is also invisible.


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The post-network could, above all other thing things, be somehow visible.


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Thank

You


THANK YOU.

tedx vienna - the post network, slides and text

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