Digital Scale Topology
The recent chain of events that started in the Middle East the last 7th of October has revealed -again- that we are in the midst of a profound societal phase shift. I am not just talking about the war nor the specifics of the middle eastern situation. Believe it or not there are even deeper trends at play than the millennia of feud in this region of the Earth. I identify 3 transformations that are all happening at the same time. I think that each of those three transformations are individually more significant than the invention of the printing press. Now we are experiencing all of them at the same time. If you think we are living through troubled times think again, it is just the beginning of it, you ain't see nothing yet.
The three Stooges
We are the civilization of the books. Those books can be the Bible, the Koran, the Talmud or the Constitution. Written words are the deepest foundation of our civilization (across the globe). Digital technologies change that. Because the production, diffusion and search of information has become marginally free. Once you have a computer and access to the network the costs of new information is 0. I have discussed this at length in this Substack.
AI add another layer to this idea that ideas can be shared across the globe: they can even be created by machines. It can be seen with the same lenses: the production of ideas is like the incarnation process. A digital portal has opened between ideas and reality, this digital portal has been turned into a highway by AI. You now just need the seed of the idea and Chat GPT will fill the rest.
Digital technologies have also transformed our approach to knowledge and how it is represented. The most visible part are the digital maps. Pinch and zoom have no equivalent in a paper world. What is behind this is the idea that digital technologies allow you to navigate through scales. Think at how details -and the scale of the map- change without any effort. More abstractly: smartphones allow you to navigate back and forth from the individual (selfies) to the global (world news) in an integrated way. Very large narratives are intertwined with extreme zoom on localized events (the 257 pictures and videos about a single event together with the bio of participants etc.).
The third stooge is a deep transformation of how we perceive the topology of the world. The idea of neighborhood -those who are close/far away from you- has been impacted maybe even more deeply than both of the previous axis. Today you know/meet people no longer because of geographic constraints -people from your village- but because of shared ideas and values -groups on social media. Those groups are delimited by virtual boundaries. Traditional borders have ceased to function as they were. It can be seen at multiple levels: the border crisis in Europe and south of the USA is one, but the use of drones is another striking one. The face of tmwar and terrorism have changed. Walls and usual fortifications don’t work as well versus flyong robots. Even battle tanks were kinetically impacted : they were not designed to be shot from the sky.
The Israel Hamas War
Let’s now tackle with a concrete example of how those concomitant revolutions manifest themselves in the world. The Israel/Hamas War that started by the attack of Hamas members on October 7 is a poster child on those three axis.
The most visible part is clear: instantly there were demonstrations everywhere on Earth. It is possible that the amount of people involved is strictly greater than the sum of all existing Palestinians and Israelians. The blurry part of borders was also clear right from the start: from an Israel/Hamas perspective it morphed into Israel/Palestine in less than 17 seconds. Even mental borders are no longer clear. This absence of clarity is also an expression of the “pinch and zoom” culture. Moving from a precise event -the attack that took place on October 7th- to decades and millennia of local feud (back and forth) became the most popular exercise in the world. Do you remember documentaries on WWII ? They were very impersonal at the level of fighters. Great battles like Stalingrad, El-Alamain, Midway, etc. were represented as arrows on maps accompanied with footage of fights in which privates were indistinguishable from one another. The heroic actions of an individual were the exception. They have become the rule. Nowadays fights are broadcasted live on Twitch and in Instagram stories.
Not surprisingly the exact opposite can be witnessed when asking people what they think about what happened. They generally skip the specifics and use very broad terms. For instance it is almost.impossible to hear clear statements about Israelis victims on a pro-Palestinian demonstrations. Answers always deflect to: right to resist, condamnation of all civil population casualties, free Palestine etc. There is never an explanation of what those blanket expressions amount to in this particular situation. When pushed further the interlocutor will switch back to specifics…of the other side - babies killed by bombing in Gaza. Perfect example of what I call multiple therapy discussions.
The covid crisis is constantly displaying those kind of conversations
“A - You need to vaccinate.
B - Is it really worthy because this disease is very mild for my age group?
A - But there is this 30 years old guy without antecedent in hospital. It can happen to anyone.
B - Now that you say it, I know a guy who had an adverse reaction to vaccines.
A - But statistically there are very few adverse reactions...”
This type of conversation are very frequent. They act as multiple therapies. The subtle idea behind multiple therapies is that by having a cocktail of drugs, it makes it impossible for germs to become resistant. Indeed, if only one drug would be used at a time, by selection, germs may finally find mutations that help them to resist. But if the multiple therapy is cleverly tuned, then evolving to avoid drug 1 will make the bug more sensible to drug 2, likewise resisting to 2 may make the bug more vulnerable to drug 3 etc. It creates an evolutionnary bind from which the bug cannot escape. It has worked marvelously well against AIDS. Such conversations bind you in a similar way: by changing the scope of the discussion (are we talking about statistics or about peculiar/lived experiences?) at each turn makes any progress impossible. The conversation turns into a never ending negative ring. :
The very same script is at play. Replace “vaccination” with military reaction/resistance and “adverse event” with civilian casualties.
Now What ?
Digital technologies have progressed too fast. Material world has been lagging for decades. It is like the harmony has been broken. Now we are living the return of materiality under its most dire trait: War. Maybe we did something like living above our pay grade for too long. Since the end of cold war the global security architecture hasn’t really changed. At least formally. The UN is supposed to run the show following rules etc. In fact it worked until an hegemon was able to impose his order on the rest of the planet. But new technologies have reduced the gap and a multipolar world is back. Moreover humanity and humans are not just ideas. It is not because you can have a zoom with an inhabitant of Gaza that there is no longer any territorial problems over there. Likewise having an Ukrainian flag in your bio does 0 with relation to the war. Yet there is this feeling of global village, or global town square to borrow from E. Musk. The discrepancies have, one way or another, to be resolved. It will be done not through posts but through concrete actions. What will emerge is anyone’s guess at this point.