Now we must all become Professor X…

Real-time hyper-connectivity has the potential to bend our perception in powerful ways. We need a better framework for understanding our own software.

Professor Charles Francis Xavier is the Marvel comic character who first appeared in September 1963. His story can be summarized as something like being gifted with a powerful brain mutation that allows for, or perhaps forces him into, a direct neural connection to the global consciousness of humanity. What this means is that he can hear thoughts; he can zero in on conversations across the world; he can see hidden details; he can hear cries for help while visualizing their direct physical context.

At first, his new powers were severely debilitating. With a new streaming connection to all of the emotional and physical activity of humanity, he could not focus. He was overpowered by human suffering. His prioritization engine broke down. The capacity of his native software was overwhelmed. Out of necessity, he did two things to cope:

1. He trained his brain and spirit, or in effect, he was forced to develop a new internal software to process the vast amount of information streaming through his brain.
2. He built a supercomputer named Cerebro that allowed him to better focus his power while tapped into the streaming neural landscape of human consciousness.

Most recently the Professor X character was played by actor Patrick Stewart in the numerous Marvel movie adaptations of the original comic concepts. Patrick Stewart plays the character as a soft and patient, perhaps brilliant, yet eternally humbled and wheelchair-bound old man. He is the figurehead of a collective of mutants committed to positive change and respect for all people. The X-men collective are often in an existential battle against a distributed group of mutant privateers whose personalities have been overwhelmed by negativity. Professor X is the elder of grand stature — and his story illustrates what we must quickly become as hyper-connected digital humans.

What happens when we ‘know’ everything?

In the very early 1990’s, the Internet was a place of exploration. Its penetration into the global telephony network was limited. We used “dial-up modems” to connect to the Internet. A fast data transfer rate at the time was around 56KB per second (if we were lucky). We paid by-the-minute to use the Internet.

In the very early 2000’s, the Internet was maturing quickly, yet it was still juvenile and exploratory.

By the very early 2010’s, the Internet had officially arrived and enmeshed itself into humanity. However, there was still a clear latency, or delay, between the production of information and its distribution and transmission.

In 2020, the average Internet connection speed in the United States is around 3-6 MB per second , depending on your math— almost 100x faster than a 56K modem.

We are now fully able to play the game of hyper-connectivity. In effect, we now have the capacity as a human with an Internet connection to be so much closer to ‘knowing everything’ than we did 10 years ago. This comes with all of its beautiful and negative potential.

Any question we have is just a query away. How amazing! Experts from all over the world share their insights and learnings that have taken a lifetime to distill. At the same time, we are inundated with a streaming barrage of extremely biased micro-clips and snaps of digital narrative that we cannot quickly decode — from all realms: social, entertainment, science, health, news, and more.

We are now experiencing what it’s like to be connected to the firehose of human events, emotions, quips, deep thoughts, musings and more. We are as close as we have ever been to understanding Professor X.

Digital news information in 2020

As recently as 2010, the traditional media and knowledge system was primarily a ‘pull’ system with large latency, or time delay, between an event and its distribution. There was a massive backlog of potential things to focus on. Some were selected and addressed; the rest were deprioritized and fell out of the frame of focus. The traditional model went like this:

• something happened somewhere
• someone had to expend a great deal of effort to obtain documentation of that something
• someone had to piece that documentation together, reformat it, and present it concisely in order to provide an editorial lens to the event or new knowledge acquisition

That traditional ‘pull’ system was effectively a large filter for the local and global event-sphere; slowing down information that resulted in a manageable and consumable stream of data.

That has changed. Today when we open the door (our mind) to the Internet in the many ways we do each day, we are taking a small gulp from a massive stream of unfiltered and accessible humanity. To say that this is overwhelming should be an understatement. We are seeing the dramatic effects of our inability to filter this much information. Perhaps we are like Professor X before he developed his mind and spirit.

We simultaneously open the gates to heaven and hell and we are assaulted with so much new information, faster than ever, and our prioritization and filtering software is out of date. Perhaps more accurately, the software for our new reality does not yet exist, and we are desperately trying to write lines of code into our being in real-time as our new hyper-connected world evolves alongside us in real-time, conspiring against our new algorithms, functions, methods, protocols and frameworks.

https://ourworldindata.org/internet

The Covid pandemic has introduced new players, stages, levels and dimensions into a game of hyper-connectivity that has been rapidly evolving since 2010. This new game has very quickly been overwhelmed by real-time citizen-generated content that seems to be piped through the dimensions of fear, social dynamics, conspiracy, and ideological and political violence. To be sure, within this stream of information there are myriad illustrations of truth, beauty, enlightenment, and more. However, history’s deepest thinkers have all keyed in on a single fact: humans have a powerful connection to fear and chaos—and our entire life may be well spent in a conscious battle against these two adversaries. Fear and chaos draw us in like the light of a campfire; a phenomenon that must continue to scare us into humility.

As hyper-connected humans, when we sip on the firehose of aggregate human content generated on the Internet, we can receive instant confirmation of the fact that life can be dominated by irrationality, confusion, chaos and suffering. If that chaos does not have greater concepts against which to be weighed, the power of suffering and negativity takes over.

Quite simply, we are playing a dangerous psychological and biological game in real-time with incomplete and buggy software, and we need to slow down and rewrite our software before we fully engage with this new game.

Our software is incomplete

What trends do we see that let us know that our software is incomplete?

• As we gain access to infinitely more information, we are having more trouble distilling the truth. Furthermore, emotional truth can start to overwhelm and outweigh objective truth. We are realizing how much truth has gone unseen. This can be an enlightening and powerful exposure. Yet with so much new unfiltered information, it is not easily mapping onto our existing foundations of truth. We are overwhelming our database by trying to review and insert all of the rows of new data in real-time, i.e. we are trying to focus on everything, all the time. We are trying to create new buckets or database tables that give each new micro-insight the same priority as our existing stored data. We run out of CPU and storage capacity. Then we start ‘lazy-filtering’ data into large buckets, saving what we are able and discarding the rest. Many of us are trying to pursue omniscience (all-knowing), with each atomic data point given full attention and importance up until the point that our operating system exceeds all available resources and crashes.
• As we have become more connected to real-time information, we have become more negative (the references here are too many to count, but it’s worth a Google search). Our new reality seems to optimize for negativity over time, both in content and in its emotional manifestation inside of us.
• Meme culture has clearly crossed the chasm between digital life and real life. Ideas, concepts and social themes are now like matches lit in a field of ether. This is not new, per se, but with the addition of a new and mature real-time Internet, the speed and penetration of memes has never been more powerful. Because many of our emotional and mental systems are overwhelmed with too much real-time data, memes can act like a Trojan Horse or virus if we are not explicitly careful.

How do we live out the model of Professor X?

Now that we have a new way of ingesting the seeming infinitude of human chaos, suffering and negativity, we have to decide which is better:

• to be a human with positive future potential, in spite of our historical negative potential
• to be a human with infinitely negative historical potential, with limited and dubious future potential (based on our new ‘more real’ understanding of the totality of historical human error)

With the addition of our new powers obtained from being plugged into the firehose of human consciousness, if we focus on the irreparably negative aspects of life on this planet, it will overpower our will for positive bias. With our new powers, we can destroy just as quickly as we can improve—perhaps much faster.

Whichever lens we choose will become immediately powerful because we can now quickly overwhelm our filtering mechanisms with too much data. In short, if we decide that life on this planet is a grand and intricate conspiracy, as opposed to a universal battle against our individual negative potential, we can immediately and permanently confirm and accelerate such a bias.

Without care we may not realize that we have long-since overwhelmed the filtering capacity in our existing software. The scariest thing, is that by talking about our software, we are really talking about our mind and our heart—and of our life’s board of prioritization, filled with sticky notes that contain fragments of the mental, physical and emotional tasks that will shape our future potential. What if many of our prioritization boards only have enough space for negative sticky notes because our database is already full and our filtering system has broken down?

Before connecting to the information firehose, be careful.

What outcomes are we seeing manifest within our minds and hearts? Is negativity overpowering our operating system? It’s ok to admit this, and to understand that our operating software may be old and insufficient—perhaps even unwritten.

We must SLOW DOWN

We must re-introduce latency into our emotional weighting system, i.e. SLOW DOWN. STOP. Pause. Wait. Objectively evaluate. We must interrupt the data pipeline from ingestion (information consumption) to mapping. This mapping moves from optic/aural, to emotional, then physical. This is a scary idea. If our software is overwhelmed and biased toward negativity, the end result will naturally manifest itself in the physical world—perhaps in the form of poor mental and physical health, interpersonal problems, and ultimately violence. The new real-time Internet has the potential to purely reinforce an existing filtering defect in our software, because just a small bit of data out of the firehose is more than we can handle. In 2020, just consuming a single source of information can be an overwhelming full-time job. If that source (or a constellation of sources around it) cause negative manifestations in our lives, how would we know if our software is overwhelmed?

We must ‘pull’ from the firehose instead of allowing it to mainline information directly into our already overwhelmed emotions. In effect, we must be emotionally ready to consume from the new real-time firehose. Each new piece of information should neither darken our view of human potential, nor of our own potential on this planet.

There are many people experimenting with ideas of how to take a step back from the digital firehose, and they are noticing great benefits.

We may need to re-evaluate our value systems

We are all humans, fighting the infinite power of the universe and heading toward certain death. Most of our power on this planet is illusory in contrast to nature and the greater cluster of planets around us. We are all some parts beauty and beast. We are all constantly afraid. All of us.

If we have a new and powerful source of potentially self-reinforcing negativity, have we dedicated time to review if there have been deep and lasting negative manifestations in our minds, hearts, emotions and interpersonal relationships? Many of us have not—because our software could be repeating an overwhelmed and incomplete program that tells us we are working just fine. Information comes in, is consumed and logged, and our emotional cycle repeats itself on cue each morning as we reach for our mobile device.

Part of the way we’ve both run from, and continued our past, is by making intellectual knowledge and data the ultimate queen or king of the modern sophisticate. No different than with the sophisticated class from the years 500, 1000, 1700, or 1900, our ability to identify, label and classify things and people gives us power in our societies. However, in previous generations there was at least a facade of reasonable scope associated with the main buckets of culture, society and knowledge. We have now achieved infinite complexity through hyper-connectivity and access to data. We have now truly elevated the loaded mind to conceptual God status. There is nothing greater or more profound than our quest to know everything, all the time. We see just such a pursuit bending reality, morality, science and ethics each day. Sadly, many of us cannot see that our filtering systems are overwhelmed, causing these massive new streams of data to filter into the wrong buckets, being prioritized in all the wrong ways.

In effect, many of us are becoming powerful mutants with a dark and misunderstood psyche.

And so…

If we are feeling lost, perhaps a first step is to unplug for as long as it takes to cool down our brain and recalibrate our filtering systems. Perhaps a next step is to simplify our personal and interpersonal goals and ideals, and write them down on a real sheet of actual paper with an old-fashioned writing implement called a pen or pencil. Who do we want to be, in an overly simplified ideal form? Just a list of our highest-order interpersonal and familial values. Which are more important to us, family or media—parents or politics—children or ideology—accusation or understanding—listening or declaring—certainty or humility—patience or mania? We may find it surprising that so few, if any, of our real ideals are born manifest in our political sports class, TikTok, CNN, Fox, Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. Perhaps if we recalibrate our software, we can start use our new powers to accelerate positive and constructive learning (as opposed to negative and destructive learning), become more humble, deepen our interpersonal humane respect, increase our capacity to care for and uplift each other, and reinforce positive and sincere change. However, it is important to remind ourselves that if our new powers begin to skew in all the negative directions without conscious detection—we, as well as our peers, may become cloaked as part of a distributed collective overwhelmed by unconscious and hyper-connected darkness.

Find me at WilliamBelk.com. Follow me on Twitter.