The Wellspring of Belief
I recently met someone who told me that the United States has 52 states.
The nature of our conversation precluded me from making this the problem I was going to focus on, but it did introduce a number of questions.
What were the two extra states called? Where were they? When had they entered the Union? What machination of information management had prevented me from having ever heard of them? These answers would all have proven wildly complex, I’m sure (my friend had a particular taste for conspiracies, you see—the people in control were forever trying to keep important secrets from the rest of us).
But the specifics weren’t precisely the point. Instead, I found myself thinking about how important the stories we tell ourselves are, and how those stories emerge from the systems that we find ourselves wrapped up in.
True or false, our disconnect illuminates the importance of history as both field of study and public commodity. The stories we tell ourselves about who we are make us those people. They shape our interactions, assumptions; frames of our connections, rivalries, and loves. Understood thus, historiography takes on a sublime importance in the shaping of social and political discourses, and by extension, the outcomes they produce. Not that this is news. It just might be new to you.
This raises an important question of course. How do we know which parts of the human story matter? History is messy, full of both verifiable records and imagined myths. But in a world where truth is increasingly abstracted, the distinction between the two can blur. Consider: I have also met people who believe that, once upon a time, there was a powerful and sophisticated civilization called Atlantis. Supposedly, the Atlanteans invented flying machines, something like electricity, and possessed secret wisdom that we moderns could only dream of recreating. It’s rather like if Star Trek had already come and gone.
It strikes me as absurd, but a certain type of person really goes in for it. Some go so far as to claim that the suppression of this secret Atlantean history is the work of a small cabal of powerful people who fear what might happen if the rest of the population were to learn how far we had fallen; how much the truth of our species had been diluted and hidden. It’s not a logic I’m sure I follow, but it’s out there.
At best, it’s kinda dumb, but it reveals something important about why we should be concerned with stories. Prehistory might not really mean much in the grand scheme of things, but it was a lengthy and significant period in the development of our present. Its lost knowledge might indeed offer an important view into who we were and who we could be; or maybe just another means for proving we are who we say we are. But in any case, the truth is less important than the meaning we ascribe to the records our ancestors left behind. In other words, human beings don’t just create systems based on stories we carry; we build systems to shape how those stories are told, passed on, and recreated.
Which is where we should stop to consider the future that follows our present. We live in an amazing age—information dances around the globe like the tidal vortex of a black hole (a singularity we might dare call Truth). We have never had access to more of ourselves than we do right now—the rock piles of our ancestors pale in comparison to the fractured beauty of the modern American interstate system (and America’s isn’t even the best in the world). Without it, Elon Musk couldn’t stand a real chance of entombing himself on Mars. Khufu, on the other hand – the guy entombed within the Great Pyramid of Giza – quite literally couldn’t have even dreamed of such a conceit. Instead, he had to settle for driving his people to build a big triangle. And I suppose it should trouble us a little that so many people still think the pyramids to be the greatest achievement of the human experiment, rather than one of its first.
Machines That Tell Stories
Consider the development of the computer networks, arguably a far greater accomplishment than anything the ancient Egyptians came up with. Computer networks, like every other great development, arose out of the stories we tell about ourselves. One of the first was a system called SAGE (the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment), developed by the US Air Force to improve coordination between the ground-based radar stations that watched out for inbound Soviet bombers and missiles following the outbreak of the Cold War. The SAGE project came on line in 1958, and took data from a variety of radar stations positioned around the country to create “tracks” of the flight paths of incoming aircraft. At the time, it was considered pretty audacious—a way of closing essential gaps in the national defense.
Radar wasn’t new, of course. SAGE was built on top of an existing network of stations that the US military had been operating for some time. What the computer network allowed was for information to be transmitted from one set of computers to a central location, where data could be compiled, compared, and calculated without the army of personnel that had previously been required (fun fact, SAGE remained the foundational computer network behind NORAD until the 80s).
Prior to computerization, the first early warning radar network had been built by the British—the so-called Chain Home, composed of over 50 radar stations requiring nearly 130 people per, operating around the clock to detect objects, document that data accurately, and to communicate all that back to British military command for collating, identification, and response. Once it was up and running, the Chain Home could provide around 15 minutes warning in advance of attack.
The British built this system over the course of a decade or so, accelerating things once the Second World War really got going. But it was a close thing. The system didn’t provide much warning, and early setbacks nearly left them struggling for an alternative system. But Britain was, in some ways, the perfect pioneer for such a system. As an island, they could realistically provide near-total coverage. But again, the system was pretty analog, requiring an army, mostly of telephone operators, to make sense of incoming data. It worked pretty well, ultimately persuading the Nazis that their best hope lay in their rocket program—the V-series moved too fast to be effectively tracked or intercepted by the aircraft of the time.
SAGE was meant to help bridge this gap, a system that could work effectively in the supersonic age. Still, SAGE was pretty basic, running calculations and piping data back to a central command center for distribution. It worked a lot like Chain Home, save that it cut back the number of required phone calls and slide-rules (there’s a slew of other improvements of course; one should never underestimate the value of automation).
Since then, computer networks have become increasingly dense and resilient. By the 1960’s, we’d figured out the fundamentals of what would eventually become the modern Internet, with all its standardized protocols, miniaturization, and ballooning infrastructure that would come to entail. Today, the tendrils of these systems extend to every corner of the earth and, thanks to systems like OneWeb, Starlink, and Kuiper, beyond.
But there’s two sides to the information revolution. Certainly inventing the machines represented the first great set of innovations that made all this possible. Discovering how to manipulate electromagnetic waves was the first step—I think it worth remembering that all these cool devices; wifi, bluetooth, and whatever else, are at their heart, just fancy radios (the first British experiments with radar were led by a handful of boffins playing around at the BBC). The first computer networks expanded on these principles. It might be unsurprising that computer networking was first implemented around information sharing in the aviation industry—after all, that’s where the experts were. And so, SAGE led to SABRE, which helped American Airlines book commercial flights more efficiently in the 1960s (imagine the chaos of airline bookings before ticket counters could share data). The Second World War drove so much innovation, in part because it trained a generation on a range of technologies, and then set them back into the world. This is what the network effect does, you see.
This is also the way we learn to tell stories. See electrons bounce around inside of computer systems in predictable ways, and so part of the trick to creating a global, integrated system, is in how those movements get explained to their human operators. You could say that this is the fundamental duty of software, the systems that translate physical operations to end-users. Software helps us understand these interactions, and by doing so, allows us to react accordingly. There’s a line from the old cathode ray tubes and a 4k TV, and much has to do with how we observe and translate the movement of these fundamental particles. Chain Home represents the first step in developing satellite GIS. Software is a way of telling stories about systems.
The Promise and Perils of Abstraction
Such is the miracle of abstraction. With it, we’re able to turn the quaking oscillations of electrons to render your favorite Street Fighter game via Steam. Human beings have built whole expressions of life, culture, and faith on the back of our astounding capacity to abstract (another gift of language). As a colleague once eloquently put it, computer systems are basically just baskets within baskets. Or maybe it was boxes in boxes. I don’t remember for sure—like many people I’ve worked with, she disappeared into some corporate swamp, never to be heard from again.
Which brings us back (I hope) to the topic of this rather circuitous exploration of technological evolution—that of software and civilization. The complexity of the world we now live on is built on a foundation of nigh-incomprehensible digital abstraction. The systems that dominate our lives today, notably those like Android or iOS, are shaping our culture as surely as the Bible, Diamond Sutra, or the Constitution. These global operating systems attempt to render an impossibly complex, information-dense world into something comprehensible. Even more impressive is the way the do this with minimal instruction. You can power up an iPhone and just kind of develop an intuitive sense of how it works (though you can hardly say the same for Apple’s Terms of Service; but the cult of the law only survives by making itself both incomprehensible and unaccountable). The shaping power of this is incalculable. After all, the systems we interact with shape, inestimably, the expectations we hold of the world around us. And how much we bother to understand about them is essential to how we encounter them in our daily lives. There is a link between a person who believes a computer is basically a magic box, and one who assumes that God mostly cares about ritual (though something tells me these two groups are probably basically the same).
Not understanding how the story got to you is essential in understanding how Elon Musk’s rampage through the institutions of the US government can be seen as laudable by a not-insignificant part of the population. Such people have existed in a purely abstracted world. They don’t really know the story behind what they’re told. It’s not wholly fair to say they know nothing of reality; but the’ve certainly lost sight of what’s been abstracted away. Thus how they can condemn “government” yet love the Constitution (a document most of them have never tried to read).
This is, I think, the essence of the Davie Bowie song, I’m Afraid of Americans. Americans, a people that (it must be said) are in large part defined by their ignorance of their own history, only have the outermost boxes around which to understand themselves. They’ve largely forgotten that spiraling infinity of boxes inside the other ones. The very things that so frustrate men like Musk and Trump are really just the evolved responses of a system that has been forced, over many generations, to create defenses against charlatans like them. Societies are driven by a kind of physics that we ignore only at great peril.
Understanding how systems tell and shape stories has always been essential. But this is doubly important today. Our societies are becoming increasingly interdependent, and as the explosion of so-called AI makes clear, ever-more centralized. Understanding the stories embedded in our systems isn’t just a matter of curiosity—it’s survival. The physics of society demands that we recognize how history, technology, and abstraction shape not just what we believe, but who we become.