CHAPTER ONE

THE ALGORITHM OF LIFE

How We Process Information and Evolve as a Society

 

EVERY SPRING in North Mississippi and East Tennessee—the region in which I grew up—rich folks prepare their young men and women for presentation at a series of debutante parties that mark the annual Cotton Carnival. Each is organized by a grand krewe bearing an Egyptian name and an appointed king and queen. I’ve always seen these events as a deliberate throwback to a bygone era, its lineage drawn from a time when cotton was king, when white was white and black was black: ladies in their finest presented to the gentry of the High South in their High Cotton attire.

One feature of the Cotton Carnival always strikes me as a wild departure from the contrived order and privilege, however: Bringing up the rear in the weeklong parades that accompany the parties is the dreaded Boll Weevil Brigade. This howling group of drunken stag men turns up every year in crazy green buses and costumes to crash the parties. The Secret Order of the Boll Weevils also does charitable works, handing out toys to kids. But it is best known for the disorder it brings to the otherwise tightly choreographed krewe parties. This not-so-secret order might not be afforded official status as a grand krewe, but its symbolic challenge to the authority of Southern patriarchy and the legendary stories of debauched shenanigans associated with it are as much a Cotton Carnival tradition as anything.

Anthropologists have long noted similar, chaos-inducing elements in Latin American Carnival and Mardi Gras processions, events in which communities ritualistically perform an overturning of the established social order before submitting to the chastity of the Lenten period. To me, however, as a tech entrepreneur schooled in the dynamism of Silicon Valley and in the evolutionary development of social networks, the Boll Weevils are symbolic of the more lasting disruption that unanticipated change will bring to a society.

“Boll Weevil” is a not a lightweight label for a group of Southern men to adopt. The beetle of the same name, which feeds on cotton bolls, has been the bane of cotton farmers ever since it first migrated across the Rio Grande from Mexico in the late nineteenth century. Almost as much as the Civil War, the boll weevil is responsible for sweeping changes in the economics and the demographics of not only the American South but of the North as well. The damage it inflicted weakened the giant Southern estates that were built on the back of slavery and that once held great sway over the entire U.S. economy. The tiny beetle made a mockery of the “King Cotton” slogan, which anti-Yankee southerners relied on to explain how the cotton economy would sustain the South’s inevitable secession from the Union. My home county, Coahoma, was one of the wealthiest counties in America at the height of cotton’s power; today it is one of the poorest. The bug also decimated the livelihoods of the black tenant farmers and sharecroppers who’d emerged after emancipation to farm their own small cotton plots. It spurred the creation of a great diaspora, a migration northward of newly impoverished African Americans to the industrialized cities of New York, Chicago, Baltimore, and St. Louis. There, these transplants forged the communities that, now, a century later are defining a new phase in America’s civil rights evolution with the #BlackLivesMatter movement, a powerful social media phenomenon that we’ll return to on various occasions throughout this book.

The boll weevil’s ability to outsmart the century-long eradication efforts of farmers, chemists, entomologists, and USDA bureaucrats is a fabulous example of evolution, mutation, and natural selection at work. In the 1920s, with boll weevils rife across all cotton-growing areas, farmers tried to wipe them out with powdered calcium arsenate, which proved only partially successful with the weevils but alarmingly lethal for many other living things. Then, in the 1950s, farmers tried using new synthetic pesticides such as DDT that targeted the molecular makeup of the insects themselves. After some initial success, entomologists discovered within a few years that some boll weevils were unaffected by the pesticide. And not long thereafter, entire populations proved resistant to DDT. The same pattern was repeated over and over again throughout the twentieth century as new insecticides were introduced only to find that resistant strains of boll weevil would later emerge, making the product redundant. The latest hope for farmers comes from a genetically rewritten and modified cotton developed by Monsanto that secretes a naturally occurring insect toxin called Bacillus thuringiensis, or Bt. Yet still, many expect it is only a matter of time before Bt-resistant weevils emerge.

The same force is at work here that occurs when drugs become ineffective against a disease they were engineered to fight. This process is no mystery to anyone with a modest knowledge of biology: Although each new version of the insecticide is deadly to most individuals within a population of targeted pests, a small number will carry a trait dictated by a mutated gene not possessed by the bulk of the species. That gene allows those lucky few to defy the insecticide. They pass on this gene to their offspring, and the survivability trait that goes with it, and soon enough an entirely new population of insecticide-resistant insects is buzzing around.

The boll weevil’s ongoing battle with the USDA’s entomologists is thus a classic “survival of the fittest” tale. Like so many such cases, it confirms the hypothesis at the heart of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. (Ironically, Texan cotton farmers’ future battles with boll weevils could be undermined by the fact that their state’s schools are emphasizing Intelligent Design–friendly textbooks and curriculum.) Darwin’s “dangerous idea” constitutes a “basic algorithm,” as the philosopher Daniel Dennett put it. (I know your eyes might roll back at the use of “algorithm,” but it’s important to set this core computing concept as a basis of logic here.) Although Darwin had never encountered a computer, the nineteenth-century naturalist’s theory can be expressed in the kind of equation structure that runs our math-driven digital world: “if X and if Y, then Z.” More precisely, the algorithm boils down to this: If there is variation across species and if the distribution of finite resources requires a process of selection among competing living organisms, then those individual beings with variations best suited to obtaining those resources will survive and pass on their traits to their offspring.

The equation might seem simple but it sets in motion an unfathomably complex web of causal relationships, unleashing a never-ending series of unpredictable consequences in different directions. Have you ever heard of the “butterfly effect” theory of chaos? It used the metaphor of a butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon, thus setting off a chain of events leading to a hurricane off the coast of Florida. You need to understand evolution in terms of such interconnected complexity. Our brains tend to avoid complexity and instead go with linear explanations that miss all the many second-, third-, and fourth-order effects that ultimately shape outcomes. To fully understand evolution—both as a biological and a social concept—we need to break free of that limited thought process.

If you get nothing else from this book, embrace the notion that the world—including its human-built social networks—is an incredibly complex system. Evolution, with its unpredictable outcomes forged out of an otherwise simple algorithm, is the ultimate result of all of that. And human society is just as, if not more, susceptible to its dynamism as simpler forms of life.

When adaption and change occurs in one species, it affects the survivability of other species, whether predators, prey, or competitors for food, and so subjects those beings to the same algorithmic process of adaption and change. Then, this will in turn affect other species with which those species compete. As cotton plantations expanded across the South, boll weevils that were competing for scarce resources in their native Mexico were drawn north. Later, the ebb and flow of the weevil population as it evolved to resist each new insecticide changed the survival outlook for Argentine fire ants, another import from the South and a predator of the weevils; in response, they, too, went through mutation-led changes. As food became scarce, a stronger strain of ant emerged; they went from forming mono-queen colonies to multi-queen colonies, which strengthened the group’s ability to survive and procreate in settings of scarcity. At some point these kinds of breakaway strains become entirely new species.

Extrapolated to its ultimate end, the process offers an explanation for everything, including the organization and culture of human civilization. Across billions and trillions and quadrillions of emotionally driven interactions between randomly varied molecular structures, Darwin’s relentless algorithm constantly fosters changes to the status quo, creating the wonderful diversity of the world we occupy. It is, as Dennett says, “a scheme for creating Design out of Chaos without the aid of Mind.”

Growing up in Mississippi, I would hear people declare, “I ain’t evolved from no ape.” To fathom that we had “progressed” from primates was to embrace some notion of inferiority of origin and to deny the Bible. But perhaps one of the reasons the theory of evolution has not been comprehensively accepted, despite overwhelming evidence in its favor, is that it is erroneously described in “progressive” terms. We must distance ourselves from the simplistic idea that evolution stands for the development of things that are superior to their predecessors. It’s a misunderstanding that’s been around almost as long as Darwin’s theory itself. In our lifetimes it has been fed by representations such as the iconic “March of Progress” illustration of human evolution, which was first published in 1965 and has been reproduced in many forms. Our version is below:

The truth is that the random interactions that trigger the evolutionary algorithm’s output are not preconfigured to drive things in any particular direction. As Stephen Jay Gould has said, “life is a copiously branching bush, continually pruned by the grim reaper of extinction, not a ladder of predictable progress.” Keep this lesson in mind when we discuss the evolution of the Social Organism. Social media has undoubtedly brought improvements to our world, but it has also created and exposed many problems. The greater point is that new forms arise from evolution, whether biological or social, and take shape without any purpose behind them. They just come into existence. Yet we should also recognize that humans can influence evolutionary forces—after all, it was humans who introduced cotton in the South. We need not feel entirely disempowered. Once we better understand how both biological and social phenomena evolve we can encourage their development in ways that do make for a better world. In effect, how do we grow a better world?

Many scientists have long been uncomfortable applying Darwin’s powerful theory to anything outside of biology. There was a natural aversion to the “Social Darwinism” philosophies behind Nazism, Arian eugenics, and other white supremacist ideologies, for example. And other than most hardline libertarian economists, the idea that economies should be designed around a ruthless survival-of-the-fittest version of laissez-faire principles was unfathomable for the suffering it would impose on the poor. (Many still justifiably complain, albeit with inaccurate metaphors, about “Darwinian” economics forging America’s extreme income inequality.) But just because the laws of evolution are a deeply flawed template for social policies doesn’t mean that the evolutionary algorithm doesn’t shape society. After all, the same variables—variety and the competition for scarce resources—exist in human relationships.

In recent years, as we’ve become more aware of the toll human activities have taken on nature and concerns grow about the sustainability of life on earth, new fields such as biomimicry—which seeks lessons from the systems that have evolved in nature to design more resource-efficient economic and organizational models for society—are giving evolution theory a renaissance in the social sciences. Evolution has become particularly prominent in computer science and network theory, but also in the embrace of “cultural evolution” concepts by the likes of British intellectual Matt Ridley. These ideas help frame many of the concepts in this book.

One compelling application of the natural laws and evolution in a social science context comes from César Hidalgo, a colleague of Michael’s at MIT Media Lab. His theory on how economies evolve hinges on the idea that information is constantly “growing,” bringing order and organization to matter within a universe whose natural state otherwise tends toward entropy and disorder. Everything is composed of information, ourselves included.* As the futurist Andrew Hessel says, our genetic code represents both the hardware instructions and the software that runs our bodies, eventually abstracted all the way out into genetic memories and consciousness.

The point is that all matter has a computational capacity to process information and thus to produce it. Hidalgo describes a tree as a “computer powered by sunlight,” which, aided by proteins organized into signaling pathways, figures out how to grow its roots toward water, detect pathogens and initiate an immune response to them, and push its leaves toward its energy source, the sun. In so doing, the tree itself becomes an embodiment of information—an organization of molecules that we classify as a “tree.” Nonliving chemical reactions can be thought of as computers, too: They give order to inputs and forge more complex molecular compounds out that process. But it is human beings—and, just as importantly, human societies—that have developed the most profound computational capacity of all matter in the known universe, producing information in the form of what Hidalgo calls “crystals of imagination.” These crystals take physical shape in all the triumphs over entropy that our species has achieved: in the houses, the furniture, the motorcars, the computers, the mechanics’ tools, in everything that’s ever been manufactured. What’s driven humans to organize information in these ever newly inventive ways? The unstoppable algorithm of evolution.

Within human societies, arranged as economies, this tendency manifests in a perpetual competition to attain higher degrees of computational capacity. Individuals, companies, and economies evolve toward ever-more complex computing and networking systems to process information and create more valuable products. The greater the number of nodes and complexity in a network, the greater the total pool of computational power. It isn’t a new phenomenon. You can extend the idea all the way back to the first small tribes and early nomadic communities and through to the immense globally integrated computer-linked networks of today. More narrowly, the concept that social change is driven by demands for greater information-processing efficiency also explains the ongoing evolution of computing systems toward decentralized network structures. In the history of information technology, each new phase harnesses greater computing power than its predecessor: Mainframe computing was trumped by networked desktops, only to be outstripped by the Internet and cloud computing, with the next frontier being the distributed, decentralized systems envisaged by Tor, bitcoin, and other ownerless, open-source, and peer-to-peer systems.

We can apply similar thinking to the architecture of mass media. There, an evolutionary algorithm has brought us to a moment in which social media is surpassing all earlier iterations of mass communication systems in terms of its power to share, produce, and process information. To view social media as an evolutionary advance might seem like a leap if we focus on its most superficial attention-grabbing output: the banal pet videos, the destructive actions of warring trolls, and, of course, Kim Kardashian’s “Internet-breaking” backside. Remember, not all evolution is progress. Still, any debate over the benefits of social media can’t diminish the fact that its hyper-networked structure makes for a powerful information-processing system for society. Ideas and calls to action take hold far more efficiently than was ever possible with the old model of centralized media, and it’s transparency and openness can hopefully identify the cancerous ideologies that pervade our culture.

Think of how quickly political movements are organized now. I witnessed this personally when theAudience worked on the social media strategy behind President Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign. We quickly found we could coalesce supporters around distinct communities of personal identity: Pet Lovers for Obama, Veterans for Obama, supporter organizations in the LGBT community, regional groups such as Obamaha and Coloradans for Obama. This decentralized approach allowed the team to efficiently reach the right people with the right messages, and, in turn, these communities acted like connected nodes, amplifying the campaign’s message by communicating online with their friends. We were able to reach over 220 million unique people the last week of the election by making the content that mattered and putting it in front of the people for whom it mattered most.

In his 2016 presidential campaign, Bernie Sanders experienced something similar—initially, without even planning for it. In 2013, Aidan King, a twenty-three-year-old grape picker from Vermont, launched a “Sanders for President” subreddit on the social media platform Reddit simply because he admired Senator Bernie Sanders. Sixteen months later, Sanders’s staffers decided to use King’s hobby site to formally announce his bid for office. Membership of the subreddit soared, forging a wave of enthusiasm that saw Sanders smash all fund-raising records to raise $26 million from 1.3 million donations in the third quarter of 2015. The “Feel the Bern” slogan that became a rallying cry for the campaign emerged out of this giant supporter group, not from the mind of some high-paid marketing professional. Throughout the primary campaign, it was clear that the hashtag #FeelTheBern resonated far more strongly than #Hillary2016. In fact, the online community that galvanized around it became so powerful that it was thought to have influenced Sanders’s reluctance to concede the Democratic nomination to Clinton, even after she’d clearly sewn up the requisite number of delegates.

In this flat, horizontally structured network, where anyone with access to a smartphone or computer can easily and cheaply become a node for distributing and consuming information, we can crowdsource knowledge. Such shared capabilities didn’t exist when mass information was steered through the gated channels of news organizations whose expensive, capital-intensive distribution systems created a natural barrier to entry that protected them from smaller, underfunded competitors. Now that billions of people are connected to a networked system that very cheaply allows them to become self-publishers, information can be exploited in more powerful ways.

Social media puts a much wider array of ideas in front of us, shows us solutions to problems that we didn’t have access to before. In this world, serendipity, a phenomenon of random discovery that’s vital to the conceptualization and crystallization of new ideas, is a bigger element in the information-gathering process.

What do I mean by that? Imagine you see a disturbing article that a Facebook friend posts about a Pacific Island community that’s struggling with a lack of potable water. It gets you thinking because you’d just seen a tweet about a brand-new technology that can desalinate water for a hundredth of the cost of existing methods. So, you join a LinkedIn discussion group that’s focused on some of these new ideas. That leads you to a back-and-forth private chat with someone from that group who shares your passions and has skills that complement yours. Shortly thereafter, a start-up is born. You’re off to save the world.

By turning to a network of interlinked organisms, we’ve pushed human society’s computational capacity into new unchartered territory, creating an externalized collective consciousness. And in the classic evolutionary feedback loop that we observed in the relationship between cotton plantations, boll weevils, insecticides, and fire ants, these changes are in turn unleashing their own powerful evolutionary force. They are accelerating the evolution of our economy, our society, and—as we’ll discuss more deeply later—our culture.

As you progress through this book you’ll learn how to harness this powerful force for your own economic and personal benefits, as well as how society at large must deal with it. But in the spirit of the past being the best teacher for the future, we must first review the millennia-long development of the underlying communications infrastructure that brought us to this point. The evolution of the Social Organism has been a long time coming. The long arc of history is profoundly present in its DNA.