The Ink-Pot and the Palette

I seem to be undergoing some kind of mental revolution. I've changed my mind on things before now--I try to stay flexible--but this feels like it's a different order of magnitude.

Do you have that experience? Where you catch an idea from a book or an article, and it blooms and expands until it takes over your brain, and changes major beliefs, and makes you re-examine tons of stuff you haven't examined in years? And then you start deliberately reading more, and taking new actions based on the new thoughts in your head, and pretty soon you're leading a different life?

I have barely begun to articulate this change to myself, so this post is mostly an attempt to start mapping it, and find out if anyone else is in the territory.

( Three of the mileposts )

Since finishing my third read/listen-through of his mind-expanding book What Technology Wants, I've added Kevin Kelly's several blogs to my reader feed.

One of those blogs, The Quantified Self, discusses "tools for knowing your own mind and body" by quantifying yourself, making an experiment of your life, and measuring change and improvement.

I never thought about it quite that way before, but that's exactly what I've been doing--all my life! I love quantifying things. I've logged my bike commutes for 14 months. I've been logging my food and exercise for the past month. I even have a tag "Attempts to categorize myself" which kind of gropes toward the same concept.

It's more than "keeping track," according to TQS, and much more than a stern nanny (which is how calorie-counting has sometimes seemed to me)--it's a way of seeing the next increment of change and moving towards it. It's a way of having direction.

(NaNoWriMo is a way of quantifying writing--apparently a very good one, to judge by people's engagement and enthusiasm for it.)

One of the tools reviewed on TQS is Track Your Happiness, a massive data experiment, running out of Harvard, that asks volunteers to respond to three brief surveys a day at irregular times.

So I signed up. The surveys ask what kind of thing you're doing and how you feel about it, whether you have to do it, whether you want to do it, how long and soundly you slept last night--things like that. The questions vary a little from one survey to the next. They come to your email or your phone. At the end of a month, you get a report full of data, correlating your happiness with various factors.

So far (no surprise), my happiness factor is highest when I'm doing something I want to do but don't have to do, and when I'm writing. :D

"Technology wants mindfulness," says Kevin Kelly in What Technology Wants, which I've been listening to for the last few days.

Kelly calls the aggregate of all technology the Technium, and provides some persuasive thought exercises as to why it's valid to think of the Technium as being a seventh order of life, on its own evolutionary path.

He says that sentience is entering into everything the Technium produces, by means of tiny decision-making technologies, chips with about the processing capacity of the brain of an ant.

The World Wide Web, he says, is an organism, and not just metaphorically. It is evolving its own evolvability, accelerating its own acceleration, and exhibiting many key characteristics of evolving life.

The human brain has about a hundred times as many links as the Web has today, but, Kelly points out, "brains are not doubling in size every few years. The machine is."

And we're writing its software.

When we post and then tag pictures on Flickr, we are teaching the machine to give names to images. The thickening links between caption and picture form a neural net that can learn.

The 100 billion times per day that humans click on one web page or another is a way of teaching the Web what we think is important. Each time we forge a link between words, we teach it an idea.

We think we are merely wasting time when we surf mindlessly or blog an item, but each time we click a link, we strengthen a node somewhere in the supercomputer's mind, thereby programming the machine by using it.

So surf away, babies! It's What Technology Wants.