Wired Together

On a night in the autumn of 1969, in a laboratory in California, a student tried to send the first message between two distant computers. The word he was typing was "login." The machine at the far end received the "l," then the "o," and then the whole system crashed. And so the first word ever spoken across the network that would become the internet was, by accident, a small and fitting cry into the void: "lo." Behold. Something was beginning.

To see what was beginning, we have to go back two decades, to a quiet paper that is one of the most consequential things any human being wrote in the twentieth century, and that almost no one outside its field has heard of. In 1948, an engineer named Claude Shannon worked out how to measure information. Not what information means, which is a question for the whole rest of this book, but how much of it there is, in the same precise way we measure mass or charge, and he gave the unit a name we now say without thinking: the bit. Shannon showed that any message at all, a word, a picture, a symphony, a genome, could be reduced to a string of yes-or-no choices, ones and zeros, and moved and copied and reconstructed with perfect fidelity. It is hard to overstate what this unlocked. Once anything could be turned into bits, everything could be turned into bits, and the machines we had built to compute numbers could suddenly handle language, sound, image, and thought itself, all in the same universal currency. The digital age is simply the working-out of Shannon's insight, and it hints, quietly, at something we first glimpsed among the stars: that information may be as fundamental to reality as matter and energy, that the deepest layer of the world may be less like stuff and more like a message.

The machines to move those bits then shrank and multiplied at a pace with no precedent in the history of technology. The bulky vacuum tubes of the first computers gave way to the transistor, and the transistor to the silicon chip, and the number of them we could etch onto a sliver of silicon doubled, and doubled, and doubled again, roughly every couple of years, for half a century, until the device in your pocket held more computing power than the machines that sent human beings to the Moon. And having built these engines, we did the thing our species always does. We connected them. The trickle that began with that crashed "lo" in 1969 became, within a single human lifetime, a web wrapping the entire planet, until more than half of all the human beings alive, five billion of us and counting, were joined into a single, humming, always-on network of shared information.

And then the network left the desk and entered the body's orbit entirely. When the smartphone arrived, around 2007, the whole of it, the world's libraries and markets and crowds, folded into a slab of glass that billions of people now carry against the skin and consult dozens of times a day. The network stopped being a place you visited and became the medium you live inside, the first thing many of us reach for on waking and the last we set down at night. In the span of a single generation, a species that had spent the entire rest of its existence embedded in a small circle of familiar faces found itself embedded instead in the whole of itself at once, every voice and image and stranger, all the time. Nothing in our long evolution prepared us for that, and we are, very clearly, still learning how to live inside it.

Step back and see what that means against everything that came before. For the whole of the story until now, human knowledge had been trapped in scarce and fragile vessels, in a scribe's single manuscript, in one library that could burn, in the memory of elders who died. We watched, across many chapters, how easily such knowledge could be suppressed precisely because it was scarce: burn the codex, close the school, silence the heretic, and the knowledge was simply gone. The network broke that ancient equation. When any idea can be copied a billion times in an instant and flung to every corner of the Earth, the old machinery of suppression, which depended on controlling the scarce copy, begins to fail. The serpent's forbidden promise, that you might know things for yourself, became, for the first time in history, almost impossible to fully withdraw. Nearly the whole inheritance of human knowledge now sits a few keystrokes from nearly everyone alive. That is a genuinely new thing under the Sun, and it is, on balance, a wonder.

But we have learned, in this book, to distrust any power that looks purely like a blessing, and the network is no exception. The same web that makes knowledge unsuppressable makes falsehood unstoppable, and floods every mind with more noise than it can sort. The same connection that lets us speak to everyone lets everyone, and every machine, watch and measure and nudge us, in a surveillance of human attention finer than any tyrant of the old world could have dreamed. And the same interdependence that we saw destroy the Bronze World and carry the Black Death now runs at the speed of light through a system on which everything, our money, our power, our food, our weapons, has come to depend, so that the cascade we have watched again and again now has a nervous system of its own. We wired ourselves together into a single organism without ever deciding what that organism should be, or who should govern it, or what it is for.

And there is one more thing about this network that the people who built it did not fully intend, and that turns the whole story inward. Having created a global system that runs on information, and having filled it with a substantial fraction of everything our species has ever written, thought, argued, and dreamed, we had, without quite noticing, prepared a place. A vast, connected reservoir of human knowledge and human language, and machines of ever-growing power swimming in it. It was, though no one announced it, the kind of place in which a new sort of mind might stir. And in the same decades that we were wiring the outer world together, we had also, at last, begun to turn our instruments on the oldest darkness of all, the one just behind our own eyes.