Social networking and artificial intelligence are the major buzzwords surrounding technology today, and have a combined value of around $412 billion. In this paper we will argue both of these technologies are actually fairly primitive in light of what is being done with digital communications networks on the fringe of the market’s perspective. To prove this point we will examine communication networks of the past, present and future. We’ll cover the rich history of military communications, and a protest event that happened on the island nation of Haiti. After, we’ll look at bureaucratic systems facilitating state cognition. We’ll examine how some networks only deal with metaphysical production through a brief look at the art of meming. Finally, we’ll look at some of the first digital mass production networks— the DoorDash delivery platform and others.
But first, let’s briefly overview the technologies in question. Social media and AI employ digital artifacts (stored as combinations of 1’s and 0’s), and the near instantaneous processing and transmission of that data using wired and wireless communications. Social platform users upload digital media (text, photo, video, audio, AR/VR) from their devices to a platform’s dedicated servers. From there, other users explore databases categorized by origin, subject, and keyword. Artifacts as messages may be answered with other artifacts. Transmissions through functions like Facebook messenger or text seem nearly instant or function as artifacts for less immediate conversations. Messages in some texting apps can even schedule when artifacts are delivered, effectively enabling a type of metaphysical time travel.
Similarly, any AI is a program that anthropromorphizes a database. Anthropomorphism is the attribution of human characteristics or behavior to a god, animal, or object (Oxford Languages via Google). What is interesting about this is many believe we can place the flexibility, creativity and personality of a human mind into a machine as to produce a conscious mind. Some call this “the singularity,” a term referring to a loss of control by human users over an extremely anthropomorphized machine. I personally doubt this can be done. Even with bodies machines will be limited to their sensors and the artifact reasoning of their databases.
Both AI and social media are useful tools to the global market, facilitating communications of currency, ideas and information. That said, both are limited in their ability to affect the physical world beyond the wires and harddrives they are stored in. The main way of translating raw data from the internet into physical change is the user. Realizing this, many platforms have expanded from interactive phonebooks and scrapbooks to include commercial communications like markets and remittances. The services in question don’t really benefit users all that much however as most are not focused on delivering a potent bureaucratic model for users to employ for their personal benefit. Instead, platforms encourage cyclic interactions with themselves, extracting a sort of attention tax.
While social media and AI are very useful, for the most part they haven’t changed the global economy all that much yet. With the internet being only 58 years old though (ARPANET 1966) there is still plenty of time for change. Social media platforms might decrease latent noise and expand user’s commercial communication capabilities and AI might one day be given bodies and connections to constantly updated cloud databases to increase their anthropomorphization. Either way, productivity may be gained by producing dedicated mass production networks empowering users to trade, communicate and thrive without a middleman.
Military Communications as Mass Production
After the battle, Pheidippides began the 26.2 mile transmission from one side of the Greek peninsula to the other. The signal he carried was crucial to the future of the Greek city state of Athens. Its citizens awaited their messenger, any messenger, from the battle informing them of success or failure. Pheidippides ran the route in an unknown time and after participating in the battle and running coast-to-coast he was so exhausted that he delivered the message of victory for the Athenians over the Persian invasion led by Darius I, then he died.
Couriers would continue to be used in military signaling millennia after Marathon. Early postal systems provided less expedient communications across empires and between early nations, employing devices called semaphores and dedicated signal corps. A great example of a semaphore is found in this classic scene from the Lord of the Rings series or this one from Disney’s Mulan. Semaphores allow the transmission of a predetermined signal (i.e. we’re under attack, the king is coming, etc.) through the atmosphere where it can be picked up by the senses and repeated, sometimes dozens of times until it reaches its end user.
Semaphore and signal corps were early bureaucratic tools that allowed users to obtain the information necessary to mobilize armies and economic resources toward an objective. Today, organizations like the US Navy have mass communication specialists in addition to dedicated signal corps that employ radios, semaphores (lights and flags) and much, much more. These Navy mass comm. specialists, Army and Air Force combat camera and USMC communication strategy and operations Marines generally support internal communications, documenting events for officers and the general public that would otherwise have to be read about, debriefed or de embellished from the mouths of the “heroes” who lived them.
Military communications also include documentation from reconnaissance units, debriefs, espionage and other active and passive monitoring. Intelligence agencies and units support the collection and processing of this information while counterintelligence units monitor friendly forces to prevent data collection from within by adversaries and curious allies. All this focus on communication serves to keep commanders informed and able to wield the manpower and weapons their nations provide them effectively. Even in the smallest organizations, it is a massive effort to move a group of people as if they were a single being.
The point of military communications is to allow generals the time to begin planning, arrange for reconnaissance, make reconnaissance, complete their plans, issue orders, and supervise outcomes of potentially hundreds of units containing equally many individuals operating across thousands of miles. Digital communications have revolutionized military communications in ways we probably won’t know about for another 50 years. Developed at the (Defense) Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA / DARPA), the internet is actually a product of the demand for expedient communications between researchers at the military research institute, not between commanders and troops. DARPA is where engineer and physiological psychologist Dr. J. C. R. Licklider pioneered new approaches to the use of computers. According to Michael Hauben at Columbia University’s The Untold History of the ARPANET and Computer Science (Ch. 7) a draft of the ARPANET’s completion report states:
“The ARPA theme is that the promise offered by the computer as a communication medium between people, dwarfs into relative insignificance the historical beginnings of the computer as an arithmetic engine,”
…The draft goes on to state:
“The computer industry…still thinks of the computer as an arithmetic engine. Their heritage is reflected even in current designs of their communication systems. They have an economic and psychological commitment to the arithmetic engine model, and it can die only slowly…”
The product of effective communication in the military is a force that is able to outpace its enemy in competent decision making, leading to the development of potent manuever warfare as opposed to wars of attrition. Though not normally thought of as mass production, the production of character/spirit/effort/idea necessary to win battles is a metaphysical product. We highlight this example because the internet blurs the line between the physics and metaphysical. While firmly a physical thing (an electrical semaphore), those nonliterate in computer science often view data on the internet as immaterial. Indeed the bits that makeup every piece of data available on the internet are represented in transistor states— artifacts left by past users for future users. For example, according to DRex Electronics the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X, had 39.54 billion transistors in 2020. In 2023, smartphones had on average 10 billion according to Electronic Design. Each transistor is in either an on or off position representative of a 1 or 0—bits. Even in cloud storage, combinations of bits are retrieved from distant servers, transmitted through wire or radio telecommunications then converted into usable formats for the user.
Military mass production networks are just the beginning of what we can do with communication. Consider the history of postal services, the telephone, pager, and recorded media. In the rest of this paper we’ll examine the form and function of other networks.
Haitian Roadblocks via Radio
In 2023, I attended an event for urban agriculture in Louisville, KY in support of Forge Lab’s Agrinet Project. While there, I met a security guard who claimed he witnessed an amazing mass production event as a missionary on the island of Haiti. The event, he claimed, happened years ago and involved a single radio disk jockey and all the people of Haiti. The summary of the conversation is spotty in my memory, but the gist is that the president of Haiti pissed off this particular DJ and he called for roadblocks across the island. “People blocked the roads with trash, cars, brush,” he said, “within hours the island was internally under siege.”
I attempted to independently verify this claim. The closest I’ve come so far is a report from 2021 by Reuters. True or not, an event like this would count as the mass production of a metaphysical standard. The network used in this instance wasn’t an intelligence agency or military command structure but that of the relationship between a radio DJ and his listeners. In comparisson to the internet, radio doesn’t seem all that high tech. It is though, and further illustrates how connective technologies blur the line between physical action and metaphysical communications. The gray area comes from the nature of broadcast transmissions. When someone speaks, signals from the brain vibrate the vocal cords in concert with the lips, throat and tongue to produce speech. That speech must be captured immediately and processed in order to be relevant, as the sound quickly diminishes and the message lost. Artifact technologies like the audio recording changed that, creating a record of the audible event to be recalled at will. Similarly, broadcast transmissions amplify a signal making it usable to far more people than normal transmissions.
Because radio signals are invisible, the actions of the network may have come as a cognitive surprise to nonlisteners. “Where and how did all these people get this idea to blockade the entire island at once?”, a nonlistener might have asked. By the time they found the answer, the damage had been done. The internet works this way as well. Social trends used to be developed by more obvious forms of media— radio, television, theater— but today emerge from quiet time with our devices. Even though today there are around 6 billion internet users, the stratification of human interest prevents us all from being on the same page all the time. Furthermore, the global apparatus known as the internet is not a single broadcast superstructure, but between three and seven superstructures connected by TCP/IP protocols and regulated by local laws. Examples like North Korea’s Kwangmyong intranet show how the internet is made up of smaller partitions that don’t necessarily talk to each other readily.
Bureaucracy as Mass Production
Bureacracy is the assignment of responsibility to trusted human agents to produce the products and services of the state. According to Daron Acemoglu et. al., **Solon of Athens pioneered state bureaucracy by establishing functional roles in government that enhanced the power of the people against the elites of the society. Balancing this new dynamic, Solon also gave roles to elites in the government and established laws that sought mutual respect and altruism.
States are another technology that blurs the physical and metaphysical— assemblies of humans propagating an idea of what it means to be a human, and providing the necessary products and services toward the maintenance and enjoyment of said humanity. When they work, bureaucracies produce a physical result out of metaphysical standards held by the group. Employing bureaucracy, humans have changed the face of this planet while raising and razing standards of living. After many generations most of us don’t even realize the work going on to maintain the physical state of metaphysical ideas held by national founders.
In the industrial age, two primary standards have risen to the forefront. The demand economy, where the state exists to regulate citizens capitalizing on state resources for one another, and the command economy, where the state orders the use of resources to meet the product and service demands it establishes for its people. Both network types work fairly well. In China, a command economy, and the United States, a demand economy, hunger is a non-issue for about 90% of the population, exemplifying both network’s commitments to the human right to nutrition. The development of these systems to these comparable outcomes took on very different paths, both laden with tragedy and the aforementioned razing of local standards that did not line up with the state’s ideology for who or what is human.
Memes
Memes are typically thought of as new, but are actually as old as human society. Essentially, a meme is a compressed cultural expression. The formal definition is:
an element of a culture or system of behavior passed from one individual to another by imitation or other nongenetic means (Oxford Languages via Google)
Memes are a tool of human-based computation and thus mass production networks, providing standards and making them more…palatable. The result is memetic behavior that gives a network a sense of cohesion. You might also say memes compress a network’s ethics, morals and values.
Because meme’s make use of compression, resulting behavioral expressions in individuals might seem insultingly similar rather than cohesive. French philosopher Rene Giard describes memetic rivalries in terms very similar to coveteousness, explaining why conflict often occurs between people who are so similar. Memes are a type of artifact that can be created by anyone. In the ancient world, idols were memes depicting local dieties and reflecting nuanced ideas of what adherents believed should govern human behavior. Today memes are deployed via the internet distorted significantly the nature of their memetic effects. Those who know what a meme means have the opportunity to compete in expressing it, while those who don’t get it can either investigate it to learn or ignore it.
The mass production of social cohesion was the primary use of memes, but that is being eroded by the entry of commercial interests into the practice in digital advertising. As with the aforementioned local dieties, memes combined with means can hold culture captive to the whims of those able to produce them. Because anyone can produce memes in digital, corporations have stiff competition in truly capturing new audiences. That said, many corporations already have the attention of the public due to existing before the internet rose to prominence.
Doordash
DoorDash is a bonafede mass production network using human-based computation. Its users are a decentralized network of producers, processors and consumers utilizing the platform to coordinate supply and demand. A hungry user places their order at a local restaurant that produces the meal. Nearly simultaneously, another service provider (delivery driver) is alerted and directed in route to the order. Once picked up, the app again provides detailed GPS instructions to deliver the meal. The consumer pays for the meal, the production and the delivery— a costly exchange— but the convenience of the service sets the company’s market cap is $51.846 billion at the time of writing. This kind of coordination will grow in popularity as developers learn to apply the principles to more complex industries.
Similar apps make use of this communication strategy. Lyft and Uber use human-based computation and mass production networking for taxi services, Airbnb uses them for hospitality, and Fiverr uses them for professional services. Etsy is the only mass production network I know of from which actual products may be purchased that would otherwise not be available. Here in the Forge Lab, we think the mass production networks of the future will be much more product centered, at least that is the direction we’re leaning with efforts like the Fruitful, Agrinet Project, which aims to facilitate responsive urban agriculture markets using human-based computation.
Conclusion
Human based computation is the reliance on masses of humans to figure out what they need to do next and how to do it. This process has historically been achieved through the mass production networks of language and numbers passed through a central processor, and while this is still true, the technologies available to transmit at distance have changed significantly. A.I. is the assembly of the opinions of a few developers, a company or an open-source to streamline decisions. In some cases this is very useful, but could also be used as the avatar of someone who fancies themself or their ideas to be great and powerful. Meanwhile, social media has nearly the entire human population sorting through haystacks to find the needles they need to sow the social garment of the future. Fortunately, there are a lot of us and eventually we will all be able to use the global internet to produce it.
This has been a production of Forge Labs, a division of the Network Theory Applied Research Institute (NTARI). The Network Theory Applied Research Institute employs internet-based communications to strengthen the collective action of the Church. Our mission is to apply technology and innovation toward raising socioeconomic standards to meet those established by Jesus. We are located in Louisville, Kentucky USA and on the internet at https://ntari.org. Consider becoming a patron at https://ntari.org/getinvolved