email from Nathan (Item 1)

Why have I emailed you

  • Metaphysical scope (why have I emailed you)

I’m coming across a lot of information all at once, which is good, I’m enjoying it, we love the information. It’s always tough to process lots of information though, organise it, put it in a useful space in context with all the other information (which is why we’re trying to get machines to help us with it) and in the depths of writing lots of chaotic notes to myself I’ve conceded that for reasons both natured and nurtured, we need each other to do it. A nice way to quietly banish the sad myth of the great man is to embrace this: in isolation none of us can completely understand anything. In particular as we head into a future filled with vast recorded histories and greater volumes of accumulated data1, the prerequisite knowledge for really comprehending something becomes untenably complex. Comprehension might require you to be a thousand times smarter than the average human2, or it might require a thousand people sharing knowledge and engaging with each other. Whenever we understand something, it’s the result of lots of people forming a multiplex of nodes, sharing meanings and understandings and misunderstandings3 and fragments of knowledge.

So this is what I’m pointing to: we need to share information and engage with each other. So far so normal, very nice. Crucially though, it’s not just a dialectic but more broadly conversation. I differentiate the two in a sense that’s more spiritual than concrete, but a dialectic argument and its rigid roles (here’s my thesis, and here’s your antithesis) doesn’t really advocate for a complex, multifaceted network of ideas. It’s a methodical, iterative refinement of a script to its most efficient and efficacious result. But a conversation allows for all the nuances of ideas existing in proximity to others; maybe we agree, maybe we disagree, maybe something in between. Maybe we say nothing, the ideas simply hang in the air between us, and we learn something from what it feels like to have an idea hang in the air between us.

So this is what I’m really pointing to: we need to take information we discover and reposition it in relation to everything else that’s in our network, not just by a linear re-transmission to each other but by an active re-construction with each other. You could read a good book and give it to another person and you’ve retransmitted the information. Or you could read a good book with another person, meet up and discuss it, and reconstruct its meaning as it appeared to either of you. Maybe it’s even plausible that you could meet up and talk about something else entirely, but your shared experience/knowledge would construct meaning you wouldn’t unlock in isolation.

I don’t think we need to have literal conversations and meet face-to-face, or even necessarily converse with other or real humans to construct meaning in this way (but that’s something I’ll talk about in a future message). My hope is that putting disordered thoughts into a medium that affords the potential for conversation helps cohere them into something useful, even if you never reply. So far I think it’s going well, because when I sat down this evening and wrote the first sentence of this email I had no idea what I was trying to say.

So, this is why I’m emailing you.

from Nathan

  1. Putting this in down here rather than linking it inline because it’s a tangent and I’d rather write about it in future but Viktor Mayer-Schönberger’s Delete: the Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age comes to mind, not just for challenging our data-hoarding instincts but also because it was written in 2009 and is a fun read for its predictions of a near future in which we all generate untold amounts of irretrievable data, and the idea of simply predicting rather than living that reality feels nostalgic. ↩︎
  2. I’m being facetious here, intelligence is complicated and not measurable like this and trying to do it is embarrassing eugenicism ↩︎
  3. Look don’t rinse me for this but I recently re-watched this very short film I made an extremely long time ago about semiotics and communication theory and honestly I think it holds up! ↩︎