Every minute a new impossible thing is uploaded to the internet and that improbable event becomes just one of hundreds of extraordinary events that we’ll see or hear about today. The internet is like a lens that focuses the extraordinary into a beam, and that beam has become our illumination. It compresses the unlikely into a small viewable band of everydayness. As long as we are online—which is almost all day many days—we are illuminated by this compressed extraordinariness. It is the new normal.
That light of superness changes us. We no longer want mere presentations; we want the best, greatest, most extraordinary presenters alive, like in the TED videos. We don’t want to watch people playing games; we want to watch the highlights of the highlights, the most amazing moves, catches, runs, shots, and kicks, each one more remarkable and improbable than the other.
We are also exposed to the greatest range of human experience: the heaviest person, shortest midgets, longest mustache—the entire universe of superlatives. Superlatives were once rare—by definition—but now we see multiple videos of superlatives all day long, and they seem normal. Humans have always treasured drawings and photos of the weird extremes of humanity (witness early issues of National Geographic and Ripley’s Believe It or Not), but there is an intimacy about watching these extremities on our phones while we wait at the dentist. They are now much realer, and they fill our heads. I think there is already evidence that this ocean of extraordinariness is inspiring and daring ordinary folks to try something extraordinary.
At the same time, superlative epic failures are foremost as well. We are confronted by the stupidest people in the world doing the dumbest things imaginable. In some respects this may place us in a universe of nothing more than tiny, petty, obscure Guinness World Record holders. In every life there is probably at least one moment that is freakish, so everyone alive is a world record holder for 15 minutes. The good news may be that it cultivates in us an expanded sense of what is possible for humans, and for human life, and so extremism expands us. The bad news may be that this insatiable appetite for super-superlatives leads to dissatisfaction with anything ordinary.
There’s no end to this dynamic. Cameras are ubiquitous, so as our collective tracked life expands, we’ll accumulate thousands of videos showing people being struck by lightning—because improbable events are more normal than we think. When we all wear tiny cameras all the time, then the most improbable event, the most superlative achievement, the most extreme actions of anyone alive will be recorded and shared around the world in real time. Soon only the most extraordinary moments of 6 billion citizens will fill our streams. So henceforth rather than be surrounded by ordinariness we’ll float in extraordinariness—as it becomes mundane. When the improbable dominates our field of vision to the point that it seems as if the world contains only the impossible, then these improbabilities don’t feel as improbable. The impossible will feel inevitable.
There is a dreamlike quality to this state of improbability. Certainty itself is no longer as certain as it once was. When I am connected to the Screen of All Knowledge, to that billion-eyed hive of humanity woven together and mirrored on a billion pieces of glass, truth is harder to find. For every accepted piece of knowledge I come across, there is, within easy reach, a challenge to the fact. Every fact has its antifact. The internet’s extreme hyperlinking will highlight those antifacts as brightly as the facts. Some antifacts are silly, some borderline, and some valid. This is the curse of the screen: You can’t rely on experts to sort them out because for every expert there is an equal and opposite anti-expert. Thus anything I learn is subject to erosion by these ubiquitous antifactors.
Ironically, in an age of instant global connection, my certainty about anything has decreased. Rather than receiving truth from an authority, I am reduced to assembling my own certainty from the liquid stream of facts flowing through the web. Truth, with a capital T, becomes truths, plural. I have to sort the truths not just about things I care about, but about anything I touch, including areas about which I can’t possibly have any direct knowledge. That means that in general I have to constantly question what I think I know. We might consider this state perfect for the advancement of science, but it also means that I am more likely to have my mind changed for incorrect reasons.
While hooked into the network of networks I feel like I am a network myself, trying to achieve reliability from unreliable parts. And in my quest to assemble truths from half-truths, nontruths, and some noble truths scattered in the flux, I find my mind attracted to fluid ways of thinking (scenarios, provisional belief, subjective hunches) and toward fluid media like mashups, twitterese, and search. But as I flow through this slippery web of ideas, it often feels like a waking dream.
We don’t really know what dreams are for, only that they satisfy some fundamental need of consciousness. Someone watching me surf the web, as I jump from one suggested link to another, would see a daydream. On the web recently I found myself in a crowd of people watching a barefoot man eat dirt, then I saw a boy singing whose face began to melt, then Santa burned a Christmas tree, then I was floating inside a mud house on the very tippy top of the world, then Celtic knots untied themselves, then a guy told me the formula for making clear glass, then I was watching myself, back in high school, riding a bicycle. And that was just the first few minutes of my time surfing the web one morning. The trancelike state we fall into while following the undirected path of links could been seen as a terrible waste of time—or, like dreams, it might be a productive waste of time. Perhaps we are tapping into our collective unconscious as we roam the web. Maybe click-dreaming is a way for all of us to have the same dream, independent of what we click on.
This waking dream we call the internet also blurs the difference between my serious thoughts and my playful thoughts, or to put it more simply: I no longer can tell when I am working and when I am playing online. For some people the disintegration between these two realms marks all that is wrong with the internet: It is the high-priced waster of time. It breeds trifles and turns superficialities into careers. Jeff Hammerbacher, a former Facebook engineer, famously complained that the “best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.” This waking dream is viewed by some as an addictive squandering. On the contrary, I cherish a good wasting of time as a necessary precondition for creativity. More important, I believe the conflation of play and work, of thinking hard and thinking playfully, is one of the greatest things this new invention has done. Isn’t the whole idea that in a highly evolved advanced society work is over?
I’ve noticed a different approach to my thinking now that the hive mind has spread it extremely wide and loose. My thinking is more active, less contemplative. Rather than begin a question or hunch by ruminating aimlessly in my mind, nourished only by my ignorance, I start doing things. I immediately go. I go looking, searching, asking, questioning, reacting, leaping in, constructing notes, bookmarks, a trail—I start off making something mine. I don’t wait. Don’t have to wait. I act on ideas first now instead of thinking on them. For some folks, this is the worst of the net—the loss of contemplation. Others feel that all this frothy activity is simply stupid busywork, or spinning of wheels, or illusionary action. But compared with what? Compared with the passive consumption of TV? Or time spent lounging at a bar chatting? Or the slow trudge to a library only to find no answers to the hundreds of questions I have? Picture the thousands of millions of people online at this very minute. To my eye they are not wasting time with silly associative links, but are engaged in a more productive way of thinking—getting instant answers, researching, responding, daydreaming, browsing, being confronted with something very different, writing down their own thoughts, posting their opinions, even if small. Compare that to the equivalent of hundreds of millions of people 50 years ago watching TV or reading a newspaper in a big chair.