Chapter 10 2.7 The Internet is the Icon of the 21st Century

Zen masters once instructed new disciples to realize Zen with an unprejudiced "beginner's mind".The master warned the students, "to eliminate all preconceived ideas."To grasp the herd nature of complex things requires a kind of awareness that might be called a "hive mind."The group guru taught, "Let go of all entrenched and firmly held beliefs." A Zen-like and crowd-like view: The atom is the icon of 20th-century science. The prevailing atomic symbol is straightforward: a black dot encircled by several dots following extremely thin orbits.Atoms spin on their own, forming the quintessential microcosm of unity.This is the symbol of individuality - the individuality of the atom, the most basic base of power.Atoms represent power, knowledge and necessity.It is as reliable and regular as a circle.

Planetary images of atoms are printed on toys and on baseball caps.Swirling atoms have found their way into corporate logos and government seals, on the back of cereal boxes, in textbooks, and starred in television commercials. The inner orbits of atoms are a true mirror image of the universe, with rule-following nuclei of energy on one side and concentric spheres spinning in galaxies on the other.At its core is the will, the id, the life force; everything is fixed in its proper orbit of rotation.The symbolized definite orbits of atoms and the well-defined gaps between orbits represent the understanding of the known universe.Atoms symbolize the unadorned power that simplicity represents.

Another Zen-like thought: Atoms are the past.The symbol of science for the next century is a vibrant network. The web's icon has no center—it's a mass of interconnected dots, a web of intertwined arrows pointing at each other.Restless images fade into uncertain boundaries.The network is the archetype - always the same picture - representing all circuits, all intelligence, all interdependence, all economic, social and biological things, all communications, all democracies, all groups , for all large-scale systems.This icon is deceptive, and looking at it, you can easily get caught up in its paradoxes: no beginning, no end, and no center, or conversely, beginnings everywhere, ends everywhere, and centers everywhere.Tangled is its characteristic.The truth lurks beneath the apparent mess, and it takes a lot of courage to untangle it.

In his magnum opus, Darwin discussed how species emerge from individuals.The self-interests of these individuals conflict with each other, but are interrelated.When he was trying to find an illustration to end the book, he chose Tangled Web.He saw "birds singing in the bushes, insects bouncing around, and worms crawling through the wetlands"; the whole network formed "a tangled heap, interdependent in a very complex way." The network is a symbol of the group.The resulting group organization—a distributed system—spreads ego across the network so that no part can say, “I am me.” Countless individual minds come together to form irreversible sociality.What it expresses contains both the logic of the computer and the logic of nature, thereby exhibiting a power beyond comprehension.

Lurking in the web is a mysterious invisible hand - a control that has no authority.Atoms represent simplicity and clarity, while networks convey the messy power of complexity. As a banner, the web is harder to live with—it's a non-control banner.Wherever there is a network, there will be rebels against human control.The network symbol symbolizes the confusion of the mind, the entanglement of life, and the gangsters who pursue individuality. The inefficiency of the web—all that redundancy, those vectors going back and forth, and stringing things back and forth just to cross the street—includes the flaw rather than weeding it out.The network is constantly breeding small faults to avoid frequent occurrence of major faults.It is its ability to accommodate errors, rather than eliminate them, that makes distributed existence a fertile ground for learning, adaptation, and evolution.

Networks are the only form of organization capable of developing unbiasedly or learning unguidedly.All other topologies limit what's possible. A network group is full of edges, so no matter which way you enter, there is no obstacle.The network is the system with the simplest structure. In fact, there is no structure at all.It can be infinitely reorganized and can develop in any direction without changing its basic shape. It is actually a thing without shape at all.Craig Reynolds, the inventor of bird-like flocks, points to the network's remarkable ability to absorb new things without interruption: "There is no indication that the complexity of natural flocks is limited in any way. New birds join flocks don't become 'full' or 'overwhelmed' when the herring migrate to their spawning grounds, their ranks of millions of members can stretch up to seventeen miles." How far can our telephone network reach ?How many nodes can a network theoretically accommodate and still continue to operate?These questions are never even asked.

Swarm topologies vary, but true diversity of morphology can only be accommodated in a vast network.In fact, groups of truly diverse components are safe only in networks.No other structure—chain, pyramid, tree, circle, star—can accommodate true diversity and function as a whole.This is why the web is almost synonymous with democracy and the market. Dynamic networks are one of the few structures that incorporate the dimension of time.It focuses on internal changes.Wherever we see constant and irregular change, we should see the web, and we do. A distributed, decentralized network is not so much an object as it is a process.In network logic, there is a shift from nouns to verbs.Economists today believe that products work best when they are delivered as services.It doesn't matter what you sell to the customer, what matters is what you do for the customer.It doesn't matter what this thing is, what matters is what it is associated with and what it does.Process over resources.Behavior has the most say.

Network logic is counterintuitive.Say, for example, you want to lay telephone cables connecting some cities.Take the three cities of Kansas City, San Diego, and Seattle as an example. The total length of telephone lines connecting these three cities is 3,000 miles.According to common sense, if a fourth city is to be added to the telephone network, the length of telephone lines must be increased.However, network logic gives the opposite answer.If you take the fourth city as the center (let's take Salt Lake City as an example), and the other cities are connected through Salt Lake City, the total cable length can be reduced to 2850 miles, a reduction of 5% from the original 3000 miles.As a result, the total expanded length of the network can be shortened after adding nodes!However, this effect is limited. Professor Huang Guangming and Du Dingzhu, who worked at Bell Labs in 1990, proved that by introducing new nodes to the network, the maximum savings that the system can obtain is about 13%.On the web, more means different things.

On the other hand, in 1968, the German operations researcher Dietrich Blass discovered that adding lines to an already congested network would only make it run slower, now we call this the Blass paradox.Scientists have found numerous examples where increasing the capacity of a congested network reduces its overall output.In the late 1960s, Stuttgart's city planners attempted to alleviate traffic congestion in the downtown area by adding a street.When they did, traffic in the city got worse, so they closed that street and traffic improved. When New York closed congested 42nd Street on Earth Day in 1992, there were fears it would worsen, but it turned out that traffic conditions actually improved that day.

And it doesn't stop there. In 1990, three scientists working on networks of neurons in the brain reported that increasing the gain—responsiveness—of individual neurons did not improve the performance of individual neurons in detecting signals, but that of the network as a whole. The web has its own logic that doesn't fit our expectations.This logic will quickly affect human culture living in the online world.From the network of busy communications, from the network of parallel computing, from the network of distributed devices and distributed existence, we get a network culture. Alan Kay was a visionary who had a lot to do with the invention of the personal computer.Personally owned books were one of the major shapers of personal consciousness during the Renaissance, he said, and widespread use of networked computers will be a major shaper of humanity in the future.It's not just books that we leave behind.Global real-time opinion polls 24 hours a day, seven days a week, ubiquitous telephones, asynchronous e-mail, five hundred TV channels, video on demand: all these things are woven together into a glorious Internet culture, a remarkable hive kingdom.

The little bees in my hive are probably not aware of their own colony.By definition, their collective hive mind must override their individual bee mind.When we connect ourselves to a hive-like network, many things emerge that we, as neurons in the network, cannot expect, understand, control, or even perceive. thing.Any hive mind that emerges will cost you that.