This is part of the Graph Minds Notebook series
In this installment, I want to tackle the question of what it feels like to be part of a graph mind today, and how that experience might evolve. What might being in the stream of consciousness of an advanced, futuristic graph mind feel like?
A good lens for the question is vitalism.
Vitalism, in a contemporary understanding, is not about mysterious subtle qi substances flowing through an esoteric parallel anatomy of our bodies full of chakras and meridians and things, but about the metaphysical ideas of Henri Bergson on the nature of time (which feature in my Clockless Clock book project, also being serialized in this newsletter). Bergon’s vitalism inspired the modernist stream of consciousness literary movement a century ago.
This is our point of connection and departure here — stream as in consciousness relates to stream as in social media, and last time we made up a nice coarse mapping between actual social media assemblages (made up of Discords and notebook apps and things) and biological brains. Future substrates will enable richer kinds of connection, but we don’t yet know what it will feel like to use them, so we have to extrapolate from what we have now.
So let’s assume that the technical substrate of a state-of-the-art graph mind through the rest of our own lifetimes will be something like an increasingly sophisticated set of futuristic social media tools. The “stream of consciousness” of the graph mind will correspond to the information stream of activity in the substrate, just as conscious experience of being a single brain corresponds to the patterns of neural firings seen by brain imaging devices.
But what does it feel like to be in that flow as part of a collective? What is the élan vital of a graph mind?
Let’s table that question, and start from a different perspective — extended families.
One of my favorite ideas about the nature of extended families is from a short essay by Kurt Vonnegut where he argues that almost all marital disputes boil down to a single complaint: you are not enough people!1
Stated in information-flow terms, Vonnegut’s point is that two people, or even two people and kids (a nuclear family) simply cannot produce enough volume, variety, and velocity2 of information context for each other to form a stable collective. At best, they can form a minimum-viable survival unit.
People need to be “seen” in many more aspects than just one to be fulfilled. Traditionally, this need was fulfilled by extended family. Vonnegut cites the example of a child born into a traditional Nigerian family being taken immediately on a grand tour to see, and be seen by, its extended family:
I met a man in Nigeria one time, an Ibo who has six hundred relatives he knew quite well. His wife had just had a baby, the best possible news in any extended family.
They were going to take it to meet all its relatives, Ibos of all ages and sizes and shapes. It would even meet other babies, cousins not much older than it was. Everybody who was big enough and steady enough was going to get to hold it, cuddle it, gurgle to it, and say how pretty it was, or handsome.
Wouldn't you have loved to be that baby?”
I don’t know. I don’t think I’d have liked to be that baby. My parents tell me I didn’t particularly enjoy being picked up or fussed over as a baby, and only rarely sought it out.
What happens if you take this kind of traditional family structure though, and map it to a hypothetical graph mind that’s much more deeply integrated than is possible through traditional technologies and language?
***
Well, you get the world portrayed in Octavia Butler’s Lilith’s Brood trilogy (published 1987-89, so pre-internet), which I’m reading for the first time right now.
Warning: a few vague spoilers ahead, but nothing that’s not also in the Wikipedia entry, but you can safely skip this section if you want to avoid them.
It’s not the kind of science fiction I usually like to read, with a strongly biology-based premise, and dominant themes of family and community. My tastes are much more conventionally male — Campbellian heroes running around with warp drives and force fields fighting Evil Galactic Empires and such. But surprisingly, I’m enjoying it a lot (about 2/3 done), and it tackles this kind of question head on.
The premise of the novel is that an alien species called the Oankali has rescued the remnants of humanity from a post-nuclear-apocalypse condition, and is gradually restoring the earth’s biosphere and re-introducing humans (initially evacuated to their spaceships) to earth.
The catch is, this doesn’t come free. The Oankali are not do-gooder species saviors like Doctor Who. They are an extremely biologically advanced trader species, and their idea of trade is basically genetic engineering of species they encounter, leading on to symbiotic merger. A subset of them are modifying themselves and the remaining humans to form a new species, in the process breeding out problematic violent tendencies in humans.
The Oankali themselves are basically an advanced extended-family type species. They feature three genders, male, female, and ooloi, the last of whom are the biohacker gender, able to connect to and modify other individuals at the level of molecular chemistry. They serve as intermediaries for breeding during three-way sex, can heal any disease, fight any infection, safely handle any poison, replicate any kind of living or non-living material, and basically do whatever they want with matter. They focus on biological matter because it is the most sophisticated, but they are masters of non-living matter too. They just don’t find it very interesting. Even their spaceships and dwellings are domesticated and re-engineered symbiotic living species they encountered in the past.
The Oankali are also post-linguistic. They can speak, read, and write, but their main form of communication is delicate body-to-body tentacular connections. They’re a bunch of little Chtulhus.3
The humans initially find them disgusting, but get over it, and one subset begins the process of symbiotic integration, forming mixed-species family units (2 human adults, 3 Oankali adults, with the ooloi serving as the fulcrum, and children by both human and Oankali females, genetically “composed” by the ooloi). Another subset resists strongly, and fights to retain and perpetuate unaltered (and to the Oankali, dangerously self-destructive) humanity.
There’s more to the premise. The Oankali themselves come in a few different subspecies type varieties, some of which are symbiotic with their literal living ships. They have a long species history of traveling through the universe, absorbing and integrating with other species, and forming new ones. They are more an evolutionary open-source project, complete with pull requests into repos, than a single alien species. They are like the Borg, but firmly at the Gaia-biological end of the spectrum, rather than being constructed on advanced electronic chassis and being hooked up to each other via cables.
Overlaid on this basic premise is the additional premise of the Oankali life cycle as an insectoid one — egg, larva, pupa —> metamorphosis —> adult (imago), which is cashed out both at an individual level (individuals grow this way) and species level (the story is basically about the metamorphosis and emergence of a new species that pupates on, then flutters away from, earth). Relationships, including deep bonding patterns, evolve through this life cycle.
The whole thing is wonderfully imaginative, and a very different way to work out the implications of hive-mind species than I’m used to. Compared to Lilith’s Brood, Asimov’s version of Gaia in the Foundation series and the Borg in Star Trek are both really anemic. This is what you get when you pull out all the stops in imagining the consequences of truly technologically collectivized, transhumanist, xenogenetic biology.
Many of the consequences Butler works out are radically exaggerated versions of strong extended family cultures, which still dominate Africa and Asia. My own extended family was of this type until two generations ago. Both my parents have half a dozen siblings each, so I have a vast array of aunts, uncles, and cousins whom I used to meet during vacation visits to grandparental homesteads growing up.
There are those who like this kind of communal condition, and those who don’t. To be honest, I don’t. I sorta enjoyed brief immersions in it as a kid, but as an adult, my tolerance for it dropped off a cliff. If I were in the Lilith’s Brood world, I’d almost certainly be among the resisters.
***
Maximally communalized conditions (whether in the form of tight, traditional kinship groups, or non-family socialist communes) are definitely not universally attractive or aspirational for all of us.
Those who like this kind of condition feel a visceral sense of alienation and loss when cut off from their intimate communal contexts. There’s nothing they like better than big, intimate family gatherings with multiple generations present, babies being passed around, simmering resentments and convivial celebrations proceeding in parallel all the time, and so on. They live for the most connected moments.
Those who don’t like this kind of condition feel claustrophobic when forced to endure them, but learn to endure the big group gatherings, and pace themselves through them, making sure to carve out both solitary time and 1:1/small group time. Recent human history has favored this latter personality, offering increasingly complete escapes to smaller and smaller units. Today, you can live by yourself in a studio apartment in an impersonal big city and not know any of your neighbors, work fully remote, and order everything online. You can survive, with access to most of the material benefits of collectivized civilization, without ever seeing another person.
That extreme seems to be unhealthy and undesirable for most people, but about half of humanity eagerly seeks out conditions quite close to that, and quite far from the traditional extended family condition.
My guess is most of us currently fall in the middle of a normal distribution with a peak around units of 2-5, with rare immersions in larger groups, but that’s just saying we like the way we are now. One tail loves maximally atomized solitary existence, the other tail loves maximally communalized existence in hives of dozens or more. The tails are unhappier than the middle with the status quo.
Sophisticated extended family cultures recognize and try to accommodate this range of personalities. Patterns of collective life are typically structured to let people connect either deeply or shallowly, and manage their personal tempos of belonging somewhat. But these cultures are definitely not friendly to extreme individualistic atomized freedom. They are even actively hostile to them, and when healthy, will resist atomization.4
There are minimum demands on your time and attention, a minimum degree to which you will be sucked in. On the flip side, there are minimum levels of support and nurturing available. You will not be allowed to individually self-destruct through lack of connection. You will not end up homeless on the street unless the extended family situation is so dire it is forced to abandon members.
On a 1-d spectrum with highly individualistic Western pre-internet life on one end, and extremely advanced graph mind life of the sort imagined in Lilith’s Brood on the other, internet-native humans today are probably somewhere in the middle on an ascent-of-graph-minds evolutionary path.
This path features both ontogeny and phylogeny. People my age have already “developed” through 3-4 eras of social media tech and can expect to develop through perhaps 3-4 more. Our minds have already changed a lot, and will change more. That’s the ontogeny. But there’s also phylogeny. If we were to be transported to the future, you and I probably won’t be able to plug in at all to graph mind substrates in use a century from now. Future humans will be a different species.
I’m trying to add other models such as those of Ursula Le Guin in The Dispossessed, and The Left Hand of Darkness, and Ramez Naam’s Nexus (which I’ve read part of) to turn this 1-d spectrum into a 2x2. But I don’t have a satisfying one yet.
You could map the insectoid life-cycle to the secular social media graph-mind ontogeny and phylogeny evolutionary path too:
Casual social media users on large public social media spaces like Twitter are like egg spawn floating on a pond, fed on by evil clickbaiting old-media predators
Very Online individuals forming loose subcultures, but still in public, and forming sense-making networks that share information flows and mental models, are probably like larvae, feeding voraciously and indiscriminately on vast public information flows and growing into fat, juicy caterpillars
Groups going off to form cozyweb subcultural homes with clear boundaries, on Discord or elsewhere, are like pupae. They consume much less indiscriminately (and depending on the function, perhaps not at all), but do a lot more, especially to themselves, triggering processes that look like metamorphosis
Today we don’t have anything that looks like a fully realized imago/adult form of a graph mind, post metamorphosis, because we lack the technical means to achieve that level of mutualism, even if we want to. So mature cozyweb pockets tend to instead decline and unravel as they rot with age. We stall out at pupa.
Imagine if the technology for deeper integration were actually available. The recently launched Flow helmets from Kernel (disclosure: a long-time client), which do real-time neuro-imaging and signal processing based on blood flow measurements, are a first step in that direction.
Imagine if you could have say a dozen people wearing future versions of such helmets, networked together, pooling data, and somehow feeding it back to each other (perhaps via VR or AR) to shape experience.
What would that feel like? How would it feel different from being on a Discord with a dozen friends collaborating on a project?
More uncomfortable question: What if the dozen or so people were not work colleagues or casual friends (which are the categories most social media relationships fall into today), but family members?
What if 3 generations of a family — grandparents, parents (including siblings and marriage partners), and children — wore such futuristic helmets during a family gathering to meet a new baby as in Vonnegut’s example?
What if instead of just seeing a stream of pictures of a new baby on a WhatsApp-like interface, accompanied by emoji and comments like “aww, he’s so cute,” you had integrated chemical delivery prosthetics that injected appropriate drugs, hormones and neurotransmitters into your body based on the collective state? What if actual dopamine levels were being modulated directly, instead of indirectly through “like” counters?
What if instead of just seeing the new baby through your eyes, the AR display somehow fused what everybody was seeing, and what the baby was seeing? The group seeing itself in a collective mirror? What if any linguistic flows were continuously piped into a Dalle2 type live-updated imaginary that you experienced together as it evolved?
What if in addition to your own reaction to the baby, you also felt a bit of grandma’s response to the baby, which might include a tinge of recognition of a long-dead ancestor in the baby’s features (perhaps in the form of a ghostly, semi-transparent image of the dead ancestor’s face overlaid on the baby’s)?
You don’t even have to hypothesize futuristic things like neural lace to imagine graph mind configurations, reachable using existing technologies, that would feel completely alien. What I’ve described above is kinda buildable today. There are no unsolved mysteries involved, just a lot of difficult engineering.
I don’t know about you, but the whole idea makes me extremely uncomfortable, and I’d probably refuse to participate. I barely like Zoom or audio levels of connection, and tend to downgrade to text where possible (there’s a folk theorem about media that communication defaults to the lowest fidelity medium available). But that doesn’t mean this isn’t going to happen, or that I will be able to resist getting sucked in, or that I should try to.
These fundamental tensions are what make graph minds such an interesting thought experiment.
I think this is what the “stream of consciousness” of a graph mind will feel like from the inside within a few decades. A literal small-world social graph embodied by direct body-to-body information flow connections mediated by computers (which would be like Butler’s ooloi — if she’d written Lillith’s Brood today, I suspect the ooloi would be replaced by powerful computers), and fed back into visceral experience at a subsymbolic, chemical level, in a way that threatens and disrupts the integrity of individual self-hood. Relative to today’s familiar experiences that come close — sex, pregnancy, dancing, nootropics — these experiences will be from a different planet.
There is no version of this direction of speculation that is not at least a little bit threatening to our prevailing notions of self. You try to take out the threatening bits and you also take out the interesting bits. Which isn’t to say people won’t try. I bet some sort of “graph-mind alignment problem” cult5 will emerge soon enough to argue that the likeliest outcome of advanced graph-mind technologies will be mass collective suicide and that unspecified things ought to be done to prevent it.
But even the subset of humans that struts about ranting about retaining individualism and going off waldenponding to do “deep work” is already being transformed. If you are even slightly literate in memes, reaction gifs, emoji-talk and the signal language of likes and RTs, your brain has already been rewired in this general direction. And no amount of retreating to the woods to live in a log cabin and write poetry on a manual typewriter will change that.
The unimaginative paranoid interpretation is that evil platform companies are hacking your mind and attention to show you ads and control you politically, and there’s nothing more interesting there.
The imaginative interpretation is that we’re entering an accelerated phase of our millennia of co-evolution with our technology, and that though it will be threatening and scary, there are interesting states of being on the other side.
Always been that way 🌎🧑🚀🔫🧑🚀.
I just realized I actually riffed on that in a 2017 issue of this newsletter, though I was chasing down a different thought there.
The phrase volume, velocity, variety is stolen from early definitions of Big Data, and I’m using it deliberately to anchor the connection to distributed computing, not because I find perverse joy in framing communal experience in computational terms. Okay, maybe a little bit that too.
Donna Haraway version, not H. P. Lovecraft
When unhealthy, unraveling traditional extended family communes seem to breed pathologies like mass shootings. A common feature of mass shootings seems to be that they emerge from broken extended-family settings in smaller communities, not mass atomization in an impersonal urban context. I’m not entirely sure of this though. It’s a medium-confidence idea.
Yes, I’m snarking about what you might suspect I’m snarking about. Here are some tweets making it explicit.