Chapter 138 22.8 The purpose of the system is to reveal the future

Postmodern humans swim in the third transparent medium that takes shape.That is, every reality can be digitized.That is, the measurement of every swarm activity of human beings can be transmitted through the network.That is, the life trajectory of each individual life can be transformed into numbers and sent through the line.This networked planet has become a torrent of bits flowing in a limpid shell of fiberglass, databases, and various input devices. Once data flows, it creates transparency.Once society is networked, it can understand itself.Rocket scientists at forecasting firms can make more money than old-school chartists because they operate in a more transparent medium.The billions of digital messages thrown out by networked financial institutions condense into an air of transparency by which forecasting firms can detect evolving patterns.The cloud of data flowing through their workstations creates a kind of limpid data world for them to scrutinize.From certain fragments of this clear air they could foresee the future.

Meanwhile, factories churned out video cameras, tape recorders, hard drives, text scanners, spreadsheets, modems, and receivers for satellite TV dishes.These things are eyes, ears or neurons, respectively.Connected, they form a sensory organ of billions of lobes, floating in a limpid medium of speeding numbers.The role of this tissue is to "feed forward" information from distant limbs into this electronic body.war gamers at USCENTCOM can take advantage of Kuwait's digitized terrain, live-streamed satellite imagery, and hand-held transmitter segments via global positioning information (no matter where you are on Earth, within 50 feet of error) The transmitted reports predicted - seen through the eyes of the collective mind - the course of the upcoming battle.

Ultimately, revealing the future is not just a human aspiration, but a fundamental property of any organism, and perhaps any complex system.The purpose of an organism's existence is to reveal the future. My working definition of a complex system is a "thing that talks to itself".Some people may ask, then: what does a complex system tell itself?My answer is: they tell themselves stories about the future, about what might happen next—whether the "next" is measured in nanoseconds or years.