The Antidote to Impermanence: The Internet

As the website loads, so does my brain. Our computing power runs in parallel. My mind struggles to reach maximum conscious capacity. Once again, the internet seems to win. But, why?

the.com cult

Recently I have a new conspiracy, maybe the internet is a fragment of our imagination created as an antidote to impermanence, like a fleeting memory. A distraction from actually finding the truth, that it was invented to find.

In a hectic outcry to find the so-called answer, I continue scavenging, as if I am on a treadmill chasing a truth only to be motivated by a machine that propels me forward at a speed, comfortable enough to continue, but too repetitive to pursue forever. I have officially joined the “what is my purpose” cult. I would define as a privileged percent, so bored with existence, that we contour every detail, to remove what is real and devote our lives to finding a single answer to the meaning of it all, because otherwise living becomes too unbearably real to even imagine. A type of heroine, an incurable addiction to sugar-coated, and an overly unforgiving aversion to plain.

The internet has become this human-configured attempt at understanding or rather sharing what it means to be alive. A grand gesture interpretable by its creators and readers alike. At first glance, it may be mistakenly compared to an encyclopedia, but if you dare look closer it likens more of a thesaurus. Each artifact is only as credible as its reader’s memory recalls.

Today, a global neural network entertains our source of reality.

Our behavior, opinions, thoughts, and emotions are no longer our own. We merely serve as the tender flesh fueling the singular improvement of algorithms. The internet has become our god, Wikipedia our bible, Youtube our preacher, and Google our religion.

We have ironically created an information system in search of truth, only to upload the knowledge that already encompasses us. We then spend countless hours deconstructing that information. It’s like a loop function, designed to confirm that our reality is real. An outsourced engine minus the seemingly “malfunctioning” parameters of emotion. I guess our minds were smart enough to understand that human emotion overpowers logic. Love simply overpowers facts, but facts are easier to process.

Hence, the internet continues to be victorious.

one cup of sprinkles, please.

When I was little I had a friend who always insisted on ordering a cup of sprinkles. I would gawk in disbelief, almost in pity. I thought she was delusional, what sane seven-year-old turns down ice cream. Well, she did.

Looking back now, she just knew what she wanted, she completely ignored social ques, and made her decision, not out of ignorance, but out of awareness. Her mom laughed and I cried.

Unfortunately, it seems that information is no longer sprinkled as a topping, rather it is served as the entire three-course meal. I think that is why we feel so “lost” today because we are overwhelmed by constant input. We are simply not given enough time to process and sort information to filter out the relevant, from the irrelevant. New information keeps infringing on our ability to focus. Everything is coming at us with bold relevancy and urgency. Clarity is nowhere to be seen.

We experience fear of missing out, but more significantly fear of insignificance, of rotting away unknown and unidentified by the world before us. We are deathly afraid of looking stupid or god forbid not knowing. Ignorance used to be bliss, but today distraction is the high that keeps us coming back, the internet has become the greatest monopoly on our minds. Attention is now a commodity. Fame is one selfie away, money is a click of a button, and love is a swipe in the right direction. Everything seems smaller, and therefore so much closer to possible.

Consumption becomes so much easier when it is not real, doesn’t it?

When we can dream away, and escape stepping stones, hard work, and dedication grounded in what is real.

What if we instead consumed information like my friend consumed ice cream? That is to say, not at all. What if we gained the general wisdom needed to make informed decisions that align with what we actually want. What would happen if we stop listening to the buzz and start tuning in to a different frequency? What information do we listen to then?

I guess all that is left is ourselves…

the self-storage sect.

Everything we could possibly ever want to know is a data point that already exists within us. I think that is why we cling onto our past existence because it can never be recreated again. It’s like reliving dying.

I was to learn this valuable lesson from none other than a witty self-storage attendant. He kindly, but blatantly chuckled as my parents confidently assured him upon their two-year return from California…as a matter of fact, it was already written in bold letters in an official contract. Even, the most well-written contracts have loopholes.

“They all say the same thing, and they all do the same thing; they leave their containers behind, sign a two-year contract, never to return. The ones that eventually do, spend a day ridding themselves of a life’s worth of possessions. Every story is the same, I am simply selling permanence, and boy is it profitable.”

As the man foreshadowed and you probably already guessed, two years turned into twenty and my parents still unsurprisingly reside in Southern California. As for our belongings, they remain largely untouched in the same containers on the outskirts of Stockholm. Every year the storage attendant receives a payment.

Storage is falsified hope, an undeniable attachment to the past really. Once at maximum capacity, something must be deleted to make room for the present. But why would we so neatly replace the past when Apple makes upgrading so simple?

Well, we simply wouldn’t. Just take a look at Apple’s share price.

Storage has become a unit of real power. A simple metric to describe how self-involved we are. We have even extended our arms-length into cloud storage, to appease the paranoid, the ones so afraid of losing the past that they upload their entire lives on the internet.

But have you ever thought about what would happen to your sacred past if the internet dies, or even this world?

For those of you romanticizing about recognition beyond your own lifetime, spare yourself the time. If the planet ceases to exist, a glorious page or even two in the back of a history book just won’t cut it. We are unfortunately not permanent and trying to outlast our life, is quite a defeating task. Cryonics? Well, I guess that is the reverse, saving the past, in hopes of a more progressive future. To be honest, radiofrequency is probably your best bet, at least that will transcend our planet. So hey, maybe start a podcast. A fifty dollar investment seems quite reasonable considering that you probably already overpay for 32 GB of extra storage.

What I guess I am trying to say without being too cryptic is that we tend to go to extreme lengths to not be forgotten. We want to be remembered as great, and others want to remember us as great. The truth is our memory is wildly deceptive, and a moment can never again be genuinely recreated, which is what makes that moment so valuable. I guess it is the most meaningless meaningful thing we do as homosapiens. Trying to be remembered for changing the world, by staying exactly the same.

We are storing ourselves.

forget to remember.

Memory is our only link to the past, stored, but never identically reopened.

I falsely assumed high intelligence was coupled with an ability to quickly access and recall information, but actually, quite the opposite seems to be true. Forgetfulness is actually an inherent characteristic of people with high intelligence. In other words, being creative at our maximum abstraction, in other words reaching our full IQ potential, can only be achieved by limiting streams of information, not expanding upon them.

The goal of memory is not the transmission of information through time, per se. Rather, the goal of memory is to optimize decision-making.”

Now, intelligence is one thing, not discounting those who remember less or more. Photographic memory is also another story. I just used intelligence as a metric, to understand in game-theoretic terms what the goal of memory really is and how to achieve an equilibrium. My conclusion was that in an optimal world, decision making could potentially be improved, not by remembering, but rather by forgetting.

To be precise it’s estimated that the human brain can store an equivalent to 4.7 billion books — ten times more than originally thought. Our ability to store information is not the problem here obviously, unlike its counterpart, the computer. So, what allows computers to overpower most human minds in task completion?

Our minds don’t work as incubators, nor as accelerators, they work as sharks, investors in outcome. According to the neuroscientist Buzsáki, “the brain does not represent information: it constructs it.” Answers are not automatically generated through inputs of large amounts of information, rather it is our ability to extract, sort, replicate, and retrieve information that allows us to see patterns, ultimately guiding us towards clearer answers. In other words, more information is NOT correlated with better decision making or progress.

Choice has become sacred in modern society. In psychology, having a choice has been tied to freedom, while in business, the lucrative upside of free markets reigns supreme. Though “choice is good for us, there is a diminishing marginal utility in having alternatives; each new option subtracts a little from the feeling of well-being.” We are less likely to one, execute, and two, make the right choice. Once again it is the process, not the outcome, that gives us answers.

I find it thrilling when Google enlightens me with an opposing opinion. I call it an opinion because as soon as information enters our mind, an opinion is formed, a conclusion is drawn, and a sensation felt. Our interpretation is only as good as our previous points of reference and our initial goal. Just like the internet, we succumb to our own past. I would go as far as to argue that subjectivity is the only thing that truly exists, objectivity is just a tool to find common ground. I always hated consensus (a strong word, I know I was once told by my mom, but it’s true, I truly despised it), but I recently realized that consensus is weaved into the very fabric of society for a reason. That reason is progress. Imagine a world without union, where the pursuit of individual choice always ruled. That is where we are heading, and I believe mostly for the good, but it definitely brings new challenges.

Now, I am fully aware of the shortcomings and implications of using metaphors to explain the intricacies of science. Comparing the human mind to a computer is far from revealing and flawed, an incomplete analogy at best. Our understanding is simply too fragmented to assert any major similarity, between the brain and a computer, but there are isolated elements that resonate with me. So, please excuse my ignorance for a moment, while I use the human adaptation of metaphor to understand the mind through the lens of simplification.

The most interesting one being the mutual reliance on data.

All data is not equal data, and unfortunately, access to high-quality data is expensive today, which is why most algorithms are running on low-quality data, oftentimes creating severe bias. Ironically, even brain-research is being bottlenecked by information, not lack thereof. Many researchers have started to question the recent upsurge of expensive large-scale projects collecting massive treasuries of inexpensive brain data, as French neuroscientist Yves Frégnac argued “big data is not knowledge”.

Human bias is born on the back of two innate human tendencies: to misremember and to misrepresent.

The equivalence of human data is not just our past experiences, but how we seem to remember those past experiences. Each lesson we learn is often expensive, if not painful. In fact, the quality of our personal data is based on how much personal significance our body attaches to an experience. The more emotional the response usually the more significant the lesson.

The second flaw usually stems from what I call “the parrots” of society. The ones who create exhaustive, repetitive, and unoriginal noise, clouding our ability to think. Without permission, they confidently open their beaks, to mimic the words of others, asserting the Parrot's need to identify it’s peers. Humans are peculiarly similar, we adore sameness and mistrust behavior deviating from the flock, it threatens our identity.

But what happens if we shift our focus away from improving memory recall or increasing memory capacity, to instead direct attention towards efficiently deleting unnecessary memories?

Which then leads me to think about Alzheimer’s. The underlying cause is still unclear, but what if the answer lies in deletion. Obviously, the confounding variable in Alzheimer’s patients is memory loss. My theory is more surrounding the why, not the how. Computers continue to exponentially improve and become more intelligent, while the anatomy of the human mind remains almost entirely unchanged throughout history. Perhaps its a hint, that we were purposely designed to be efficient. Maybe the onset of memory loss happens as a response to exhaustion. In other words, memory is deleted in order to minimize the amount of processing power required to survive. It’s like a mechanism that shifts into high gear when our bodies are too weak to think about the past. It must save its remaining strength to focus on more urgent matters, the present. The first areas usually affected are responsible for memories. It’s a very harsh way of our body telling us that the past is not as important as the present.

But just a wild theory of mine, so take it with a grain of salt.

human velocity.

So, if deletion is the natural precursor to direction, then a prerequisite to direction is valuable information. So what is valuable information?

To address what is valuable, you must first be familiar with a term I coined as human velocity. I define human velocity as the rate at which we change to reach our unique human potential. Now, in physics, velocity is typically used to measure motion or the rate of change in relation to speed and direction. Therefore, if your goal is to increase human velocity a.k.a. human potential, you must factor in speed and direction. Purely pursuing an outcome (speed) is a signal that you are losing direction, and therefore velocity. While purely pursuing direction, is a signal that you are losing momentum, and therefore not reaching your full potential.

Value in itself only becomes tangible when we choose to give it just that, value. When we give it speed and direction. Therefore, my thesis is that valuable information is information that helps us increase our human velocity.

shades of value.

The human version of accurate is valuable. Accurate information is valuable, but only if we deem it accurate, hence valuable. Value is so hard to define because it is so subjective, a spectrum. Everyone is not headed in the same direction, therefore accuracy is not finite, its infinite. Value appears in different shades to different people, we are simply colorblind to the nuanced shades of others.

And because value is always based off perception, I took it upon myself to categorize value into four different dimensions: the individual, the sentimental, the financial, and the societal.

Individual Value:

Where I have chosen to place value has wildly shifted throughout my life. At the age of 13, I wanted to be a superstar, it was not even a question in my mind, I was convinced this was my path. I performed, sung, and danced. My value was defined by entertainment, the speed was fast and my direction was Hollywood. As I approached 16, I exchanged a pink feather boa for a beach volleyball. I trained intensively. My value was defined by the game, the speed was also fast and my direction was the Olympics. As my senior year approached I was obsessed with grades and attending the best university. My value was defined by a number. In university, I was too busy trying to make money to focus on studying. My value was defined by my salary.

Everything in my life up until now has been driven by a need for speed, to be faster than everyone else, to do things first, to be ahead of my age, to reach the next high, to experience the next big thing, to be the next big thing. But, in the process, I lost direction. I had placed all my worth in nouns and speed, and my human velocity suffered from too much motion and too little fuel. It was a rather tumultuous journey, I was exhausted, unhappy, and unproductive. I was flying around the world in literal loops, trying to find speed, when all I needed was some direction.

As I discovered, speed is irrelevant without direction. External pressure, will always inconveniently address the importance of speed. But, urgency today is oftentimes a delusional construct, and not real. (This framework by Tony Robbins summarizes our relationship to time quite well). When you discover something you truly love, you want to actively pursue it, regardless of time. If you realize you truly love acting, you don’t care how long it takes to become an actress because the process is so enjoyable, that the outcome is irrelevant. You want to act, not become an actress.

Measure velocity in adjectives not nouns.

Sentimental Value:

Sentimental value is like botox for the heart, it soothes the flat lifelines that have become wrinkled over time. But, a face without wrinkles is like a stoic, largely unmoved. Our battle against aging is just as real as our battle against impermanence, we can slow it down, but in the end, impermanence is permanent.

Sentimental value is similar to goodwill. It’s intangible, but unlike goodwill is nontransferrable. I would like to call this the emotional value of a company. Goodwill is what an acquiring company pays above fair market value for intangible assets such as brand identity. Private equity analysts are afraid of goodwill, of emotion, or of real creativity, because just like impermanence it is uncertain. They like linearity, growth metrics tied to tangible KPIs, and a healthy EBITDA multiple. Anything really that indicates a sizeable exit within the next five to seven years. Likening non-organic farmers breeding to extract value, not long-term quality. Creativity is seen as an inefficiency cost, that undermines a fairly straightforward path towards profit maximization. Pumping water in and creativity out. What remains is one massive chicken, without much meat.

Accounting for goodwill is so complex because it’s subjective, contained in the eyes of the beholder. Our past is the most valuable to us, and we, the acquirers, are paying way above fair market value for a dead chicken.

Now, don’t get me wrong private equity adds huge value to society, as a matter of fact, $4 trillion in assets in the past decade. My intention is not to berate an industry that has improved our overall economic health, but rather to improve upon what already exists. That’s just how my mind works I guess, it thinks in unrealized potential.

Societal Value:

So just humor me for a minute, and ask yourself where you believe most real value comes from and how can we create more of it? How do we maximize societal velocity? Now, if our intention is indeed to maximize value for society, why spend time increasing polarity between two sides that fundamentally will probably always disagree. The so-called “creative unrealists” and “greedy capitalists” have missed the overarching goal: value creation.

In the midst of discord, there seems to be one thing they seem to agree upon: that their work contributes the most value to society. This is true, in fact, they both are. They fulfill their roles as individuals with a unique skill set, that will inherently create value over time, by focusing on what they are generally good at. We need both. A world where value is measured in purely economic terms does not create a value-creating world, nor does a world where Atlas Shrugs. Then everyone who was rich would be happy, and everyone was creatively fulfilled. And that is just not the case.

The answer: the addition of new ideas to society is the real value creator. Before the private equity team can even begin to step in to “save” a company, a company must exist. Before investment banks can leverage a merger, or negotiate a fair IPO, an idea must be realized. That is the beauty of it all. The first step taken towards realizing any idea is massive, a drastic leap from what already existed, that is to say, nothing. What I am trying to argue is that the step from 0 to 1 is so much bigger than 115 to 116. The details start mattering more than the big picture, structures become more rigid, and the long leaps you once took become more scrutinized. Progress becomes less and less visible with each step. But, the beauty of ideas, is that they are free from the diminishing returns of capital and labor, they are not scarce. People derive value from capital and labor (the financial advisors), rather than ideas (the creators) because financial gains are usually realized later in the smaller steps, than earlier in the larger steps. The real growth is in ideas, but capital and labor receive more recognition because of tangibility. Ideas are not valuable in society until they are tangible.

In macroeconomics, this is known as the theory of economic growth. The man behind the theory is the Romer, who stated that “the search for new ideas by profit-maximizing entrepreneurs and researchers is at the heart of economic growth.” Previous to Romer, Solow proposed that the input of capital and labor is responsible for the increase in economic growth, which is true, but Romer proved that the increase is capped due to the scarcity of the resources.

Here is a good summary of the two models.

Recently Romer’s model of economic growth received critique following a revelation that one of his key assumptions no longer holds true: that constant research efforts generate exponential growth in knowledge. “Research productivity” — defined as the ratio of the growth rate to research effort — is actually declining rapidly. The model was readjusted to mimic the real world and still proves that ideas are the centerfold of economic growth — of exponentially increasing societal velocity.

Financial Value:

So that leads me to ask, why are the most valuable companies in the world so valuable?

My conclusion. Because we value them. So, why do we value them? Because ultimately they are ALL selling attention, information, permanence, and social connection. The four most valuable commodities in the world.

Think about it.

Instagram, Facebook, Linkedin, Google, Microsoft, and Apple. They all save what we create in the present, so we can go back to the past in the future.

befriending the world.

As stories, lies, and truths are thrust upon our minds, we must try to navigate back to who we are, to increase our human velocity by realizing what information we choose to value. Freedom is truly our ability to make our own decisions, draw our own conclusion based on the information made available. It’s called learning, and the internet has definitely successfully nurtured and complicated my relationship to my own curiosity.

We have grown up together, and it is the one relationship that seems consistent. Perhaps, its addiction, but I think the word addiction is a stark way of referring to our nuanced relationship to life. Maybe, that is an addict’s justification, but I have thought a lot about this, and to those of you who tell me I think too much (rightfully so), I have even gone as far as to feel the emotion. To me, the internet feels more like a relationship, charged with the usual irritations and blessings of any interpersonal relationship. A tool, that demands my attention, but also provides me with something in return. A feeling of connection, of belonging. I know it sounds dystopian, but you must feel the same in some sense. As a matter of fact, you are looking at your screen at this very moment.

Now if our relationship to the internet is abusive or not, is for you to determine. My opinion is simply moderation. But then again, how do you moderate an overly enthusiastic friend, you either ignore them completely and deal with the emotional consequences of guilt and anxiety. The other option is to accept their flaw and consequently suffer from a feeling of stress. The social dilemma.

Either way, the Internet has served as my all-round resilient friend, parent, concierge, doctor, psychologist, mentor, and teacher. Oftentimes, complementing, or even replacing its humanly flawed counterpart. It has endured my outcries, my ego, my insecurities, my weaknesses, my fears, my thoughts, my sins, my heartbreaks, my hardships, and my sicknesses. It has listened when no one else has, and it has stayed silent, only to recently start nudging me in a certain direction whether I like it or not, and honestly, though it seems like an ethical infringement, I wonder if it may not be rightfully so. I mean it knows me better than I know myself at this point. We have slowly formed this inseparable bond, that one can only gain from knowing a person since childhood. A person that knows all your bad habits, your secrets, your annoyingly unchangeable personality traits, and still accepts you for it.

The Internet is a safe haven of feeling anonymous and limitless exploration amongst a sea of uploaded thoughts. Where a keyword simply defines my intention, algorithms confirm my ideas, and everything seems so possible. Where every wish is initiated by my command. Where I can indeed conquer the world, relieve my anxiety about uncertainty and more importantly feel like I can ail my ignorance with information. A frictionless world, where momentum rules over inertia.

Impermanence is just permanent. The internet is powerful, but not powerful enough to change that. At least yet…