By Cassio Pantaleoni *
"From a fish's point of view, a lake surrounded by land is an island." - Richard Dawkins.
Why do we interact in the digital environment the way we interact, substantiating it, plotting it, observing it and, above all, hoping to find there the ultimate feeling of belonging to the natural world? What entity is this - the digital world - that is built haphazardly by the millions of human records and, more recently, records of other objects in the world (IoT)?
The phenomenon to be noted is this gigantic incontinence in the creation and co-creation of data, in the coevolution of the digital environment, in the arms race, in the parasitic manipulation of personal data (viruses, trojans, phishing programs etc.), in the manipulation of the data of the inanimate world, economic strategies based on analytical models to minimize costs and maximize revenues, simulations generated by games and strategies for refining artificial intelligence programs, among others. The statistic is impressive: it is estimated that in 2019 it reached the mark of 4.4 billion internet users. Every minute, social media registers 500 new users, Twitter registers 474,000 posts, 4.3 million videos are watched on YouTube and Instagram registers 69 million posts (source: Internet Data). In the digital world, the human willingness to modify the environment or to manipulate other individuals finds many facilities.
In the book The Extended Phenotype, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins offers an interesting perspective on the concept of phenotype - understood as observable characteristics or characters of an organism or population resulting from the expression of genes. I want to include it here to elaborate the theme. He argues that we should not restrict the idea of phenotype to just what results in the appearance of a certain organism due to the expression of its genes. He suggests that genes affect not only the body of the organism, but also the ability to modify the environment or to manipulate other organisms. The argument is not entirely new. Zoologist Konrad Lorenz, in 1937, suggested that animal behavioral patterns could be treated like an anatomical organ.
It is worth highlighting this relationship of the phenomenon resulting from the way we interact with the digital ecosystem and Dawkins' considerations. Our genes definitely give us this ability and disposition. In essence, like other animals, we manipulate objects in the world around us. Our strategies for this do not differ much from other cases in nature. Dawkins gives us a few examples:
"A pigeon carries branches to the nest. An octopus blows sand from the bottom of the sea to expose its prey. A beaver cuts trees and, through its dam, manipulates the entire landscape for kilometers around its accommodation. an animal seeks to manipulate is not alive, or at least when it does not move autonomously, the animal has no choice but to move it by brute force. A dung beetle can move a dung ball just by pushing it by force. , sometimes an animal can benefit by moving an "#39; object" which becomes another living animal (...) Although it is still possible to change this "object" by brute force, the objective can be more economically accomplished by more subtle means ( …) A male cricket does not push a female against the ground and drag it to its hole. It sits and sings, and the female reaches it under its influence. From his point of view, this communication is more energy efficient than trying take it by force. "
In the light of Dawkins' argument, the way in which each of us changes the world around us - or influences others - corresponds to our extended phenotype. We could then allude that, in the digital sphere, each one of us has characteristics that make up something that we could call a digital phenotype, as if it were an additional extension of our already extended phenotype; something that in the digital dynamics supports the analysis of each one of us and offers ways of influencing our purchasing decisions, political preferences, engagement in social causes, etc.
Bearing in mind that all of our interactions in the digital environment are supported by the Web, I want to allude to spiders and their webs and, thus, try to develop a parallel that can somehow propose an answer to the question offered at the beginning of this article.
Still citing Dawkins, in the book The Climbing of the Improbable Mount, he describes in detail the subtleties of the process of building the cobwebs. To be effective, the threads that weave need to be viscous. It is the viscosity that makes the threads sticky, preventing the prey from escaping. The curious thing, however, is that the threads lose their viscosity, forcing the spider to reconstruct the viscosity every day. However, most of them are not immune to their own sticky wires. In order not to be victims of their webs, they maintain a specific path so that they can take off to the prey without falling into the trap itself. However, there are several problems to face in the construction of the web. The first is how to place the wire in the space between a rock and a tree, for example. The strategy is the same as that used to fly a kite: the spider weaves at the end of the wire a small flattened candle that, with the aid of a light breeze, floats until it adheres to another object. This first thread is the main bridge of the web. It is not planned at all. It is just the result of a recurring trial and error process until success is achieved and the bridge is available. From there the initial structure of the web is formed and, at the end, the original bridge is digested by the spider as it travels and simultaneously generates a new bridge, this time a thread that can be stretched to form a V and thus determine the center of the web. The next two tasks are: placing the remaining rays that come out of the center and the border frame. As the spider is not immune to the viscosity of the threads, the task of completing the web with the various rays requires that it establish temporary connections, as if they were temporary scaffolding. This is how the sticky spiral can finally be built, and when the job is complete, all non-sticky threads are destroyed by the spider. There are many more details in this process but in general the engineering is this.
When we refer to the construction of the digital web (the web), many of our strategies are similar to the work of the spider. When we enter the digital world, the first data we record is captured by the viscosity of the Web. The digital world assumes that you are not immune to the very viscosity of the threads with which your web will be built. It is a trade-off for you to have the right to build your web. However, nothing is planned. Everything is a process of trial and error. Temporary scaffolding is the connection that you start to establish, which not only handles connections between individuals, but also between different channels of interaction. While your data is captured by the webs already available in the digital environment, you gradually benefit from the ability that your own web has to capture third party data. It is an absolutely hidden trade-off, but in practice it is established as an addiction. However, as you are captured and captured, it is natural that the refinement of your own web defines those threads on which you can move without the risk of being at the mercy of the viscosity already present. However, this process requires establishing bridges that, in most cases, are inefficient. Like spiders, our digital kites use the winds that stir digital nature. However, such winds are true hurricanes that will invariably favor contact with other entities included there. Digital kites are, to a large extent, all of these assets that feed on the data of the network itself to discover more accurate predictive models that need to be refined all the time. In a way, everything that happens in the digital world appeals to our sensory instruments while promising to increase our cognition, referring to the evolutionary biologist Kevin Laland's argument about spiders: their webs are adjusted by the sensory apparatus and are an extension of their cognitive systems.
The characteristics that are observable about us, and that thus constitute our phenotype, are now not only glimpsed by physical proximity. All the data we record (and also the data we consume) are observable digital characteristics that, by inferential approximation to Dawkins' point of view, correspond to our phenotype extended beyond the physical objects we manipulate, that is, digital objects. Only there, in that space of virtual entities, can we observe the characteristics that correspond to our digital phenotype. In the end, we can say that, in this world beyond the natural world, everything that is observed or what we observe can only be accessed through a narrow window that opens to the glimpse of billions of webs woven with the sticky threads of the data. It is a great architecture full of temporary scaffolding, kites that are thrown into the wind, and workers who repeatedly refine it through intuition or advanced analytical instruments so that viscosities are more and more effective.
All of this dynamics finds support in what the human being demands most - attention. Our prey is the attention of others and our attention is their prey. How much is all this worth? Whose is all this? The value is priceless and the property faces ongoing discussion. The fact is that each one of us, regardless of exchange value, wants, through this ecosystem, to achieve a sense of belonging to the world. But the world now seems to be just an island surrounded by infinite and intricate plots: this huge tangle where the observable digital characteristics of each one present themselves as something so slimy that all we can do is continue to believe that no spider will devour us.
* Cassio Pantaleoni is president of SAS Brasil
Warning: The opinion presented in this article is the responsibility of its author and not of ABES - Brazilian Association of Software Companies
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