Topological Wars
Last year I wrote a piece, The Topological Revolution. The idea that I was exploring in this essay was the following one: new information technologies have messed up with our mental landscape. Basically, what is “next” to us is no longer what our senses collect. You are presumably way less integrated within your local community than within your virtual social media circles. Over a year this tendency has not slowed down a bit, on the contrary. Let’s explore how things have changed (morphed) during this year of war in Ukraine.
War with words
Once you start noticing it, it becomes hard to unsee how much the topological vocabulary is heavily used in conversations about the news. I bet that some examples of recently popular expressions are, without a doubt, reminding you of things that you might have encountered here and there: Alt-right Adjacent / First-Amendment-adjacent issues / Proxy war / Trumposphere … The public discourse is full of those words because we are exploratory primates: this is our way to understand the world. Remember (pun intended) that in the ancient times, when writing was not yet a thing, people had to store a lot of information in their brains. One technique coming for the antique Greece was to build memory palaces. The idea is to picture yourself a building (or a trip along a path) familiar to you. Then, put objects in the rooms (or along noticeable points in the path). If you want to recall a list you can put the items of the list, one in each room. Then you can recall the content of the list by mentally visiting the rooms of your memory palace. It works surprisingly well and you can adapt the technique to remember, for instance, numbers by associating a number with a predetermined object (say 9 is a banana, 8 is a ball, etc.). This is the “trick” used by those freaks who remember thousands of digits of Pi. The technique relies on the fact that we are biologically wired to remember places. We remember geographically related things much better than abstract things like words or sentences. Likewise our way to understand things is described as making “progress”. In his pre-fame work, J. Peterson in “Maps of Meaning” explores (!) the theory along which what we call “meaningfull" is actually a measure of the progress towards a goal.
The use of words is of paramount importance in the realm of social media. They shape the discourse. Political decisions are a downstream effect of those conversations. Make no mistakes, as G. Biden would say, what is talked about in legislative chambers do not fall from the sky. Of course you have swamp things (lobbying and co) going on, but don’t understimate the soft influence of casual discussions. Elected representants are on Twitter and other social media: this is the XXIth way to perceive the world. By changing the landscape in which the conversation is happening on the public square (Twitter for better or worse in our days) you can actually have an enormous influence on the legislative agenda.
War actions
So this has unravelled, as always, step by step. It started with sanctions, that were quickly followed by javelins and various ATGMs and manpads. Then came MANPADS, then big guns, HIMARS, main battle tanks and before you know it jet fighters are not yet on the table … but you know how it works. The initial statement by the Biden administration was that sending tanks would mean World War III (reluctantly recognized as true, but needing context, by the Newsweek fact checkers for what it’s worth…). It took almost a year but here we are.
This gradual progression thing is well-known. If you want to understand how laymen can end up in an einsatzgruppen, I recommand you the book “Ordinary Men” by C. Browning. The recipe can be summarized into the “one step at a time” one liner. The link with topology is the following: the size of the steps is actually changing because of our new information technologies. The way you make people walk to places they didn’t want to go in the first place also. For a topologist objects that appear very different are in fact similar. For instance a mug and a doughnut are the same thing from a topological point of view.
The idea is that if you imagine the material from which the mug is built, you can apply a serie of continuous deformations (basically you don’t tear the material or puncture it) and end up getting a doughnut shape object. The continuous deformation is the mathematical equivalent of the “one step at a time” recipe. There are many topolgical characteristics. In the mug/doughnut example, it is the number of “holes” (technical term is “genus”).
It turns out that the public discourse is very malleable. A concrete example, that has been developping for the last three years is the origin of the COVID pandemics. The last episode, at the time of writing, is an extraordinary declaration of the Department of Energy
This is continuous deformation being performed under your eyes: there are new informations, but yet they remain at “low confidence”. The whole drama is scripted in such a way that things are said but not really etc. Yet the narrative is clearly evolving. Remember that many professional journalists have been sacked just to ask questions about it. I won’t even talk about deplatformed actors, and demonetized videos etc., of this narrative arc.
Wars are just starting
So what can be said at this point about all that?
Firstly that our mental topology itself is changing. It is hard to grasp because topology is what allows you to have a discussion about shapes. The very ways by which we understand notions like “neighborhood relation” is evolving. It is a higher order transformation.
Secondly that we have to develop/invent an equivalent of topological characteristics that makes the manipulation of the global conversation manifest. The evolution of the narrative around the origin of COVID is just one example. But we should not accept such evolutions without requiring solid explanations and a reckoning of what fucked up. What has been done is similar to puncturing the surface in topology: it is not a transformation that is accepted, at least not without having serious discussions and justifications about why it would be justified. Have you heard any institutions saying something like “sorry we fucked up, and here is why we fucked up, and here is how we are not going to fuck up again next time” ?
Me neither.