Tag Archives: Global Brain

Crushing the Stack

If in The Code Economy Philip Auerswald managed to give us a succinct history of the algorithm, while leaving us with code that floats like a ghost in the ether lacking any anchor in our very much material, economic and political world. Benjamin Bratton tries to bring us back to earth. Bratton’s recent book, The Stack: On software and sovereignty provides us with a sort of schematic with which we can grasp the political economy of code and thus anchor it to the wider world.

The problem is that Bratton, unlike Auerswald, has given us this schematic in the almost impenetrable language of postmodern theory beyond the grasp of even educated readers. Surely this is important for as Ian Bogost pointed out in his review of The Stack: “The book risks becoming a tome to own and display, rather than a tool to use.” This is a shame because the public certainly is in need of maps through which they can understand and seek to control the computational infrastructure that is now embedded in every aspect of our lives, including, and perhaps especially, in our politics. And the failure to understand and democratically regulate such technology leaves society subject to the whims of the often egomaniacal and anti-democratic nerds who design and run such systems.

In that spirit, I’ll try my best below to simplify The Stack into a map we can actually understand and therefore might be inclined to use.

In The Stack Bratton observers that we have entered the era of what he calls “planetary scale computation.” Our whole global system of processing and exchanging information, from undersea fiber-optic cables, satellites, cell-phone towers, server farms, corporate and personal computers along with our ubiquitous smartphones he see sees as “an accidental megastructure” that we have cobbled together without really understanding what we are building. Bratton’s goal, in a sense, is to map this structure by treating it as a “stack”, dissecting it into what he hopes are clearly discernible “layers.” There are six of these: Earth, Cloud, City, Address, Interface and User.

It is the Earth layer that I find both the most important and the most often missed when it comes to discussions of the political economy of code. Far too often the Stack is represented as something that literally is virtual, disconnected from the biosphere in a way that the other complex artificial systems upon which we have come to depend, such as the food system or the energy system, could never be as a matter of simple common sense. And yet the Stack, just like everything else human beings do, is dependent upon and effects the earth. As Bratton puts it in his Lovecraftian prose:

The Stack terraforms the host planet by drinking and vomiting its elemental juices and spitting up mobile phones. After its short career as a little computing brick within a larger megamachine, its fate at the dying end of the electronics component life cycle is just as sad. What is called “electronic waste” inverts the process that pulls entropic reserves of metal and oil from the ground and given form, and instead partially disassembles them and reburies them, sometimes a continent away and sometimes right next door. (p.83)

The rare earth minerals upon which much of modern technology depends come at the cost of environmental degradation and even civil war, as seen in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Huge areas of the earth are now wastelands festooned with the obsolescent silicon of our discarded computers and cell phones picked over by the world’s poorest for whatever wealth might be salvaged.

The Stack consumes upwards of 10 percent of the world’s energy. It’s an amount that is growing despite the major tech players efforts to diminish its footprint by relocating servers in the arctic, and, perhaps soon, under the sea. Although gains in efficiency have, at least temporarily, slowed the rate of growth in energy use.

The threat to the earth from the Stack, as Bratton sees it, is that its ever growing energy and material requirements will end up destroying the carbon based life that created it. It’s an apocalyptic scenario that is less fanciful than it sounds for the Stack is something like the nervous system for the fossil fuel based civilization we have built. Absent our abandonment of that form of civilization we really will create a world that is only inhabitable by machines and machine-like life forms such as bacteria. Wall-e might have been a prophecy and not just a cartoon.

Yet Bratton also sees the Stack as our potential savior, or at least the only way possible without a massive die off of human beings, to get out of this jam. A company like Exxon Mobil with its dependence on satellites and super-computers is only possible with the leverage of the Stack, but then again so is the IPCC.

For the Stack allows us to see nature, to have the tools to monitor, respond to, and perhaps even interfere with the processes of nature many of which the Stack itself is throwing out of kilter. The Stack might even give us the possibility of finding an alternative source of power and construction for itself. One that is compatible with our own survival along with the rest of  life on earth.

After the Earth layer comes the Cloud layer. It is here that Battron expands upon the ideas of Carl Schmitt. A jurist under the Nazi regime, Schmitt’s ideas about the international order have become popular among many on the left at least since the invasion of Iraq by the US in 2003 not as a prescription, but as a disturbingly prescient description of American politics and foreign policy in the wake of 9-11.

In his work The Nomos of the Earth Schmitt critiqued the American dominated international order that had begun with the US entry into WWI and reigned supreme during the Cold War  as a type of order that had, by slipping free the of the anchor of national sovereignty bound to clearly defined territories, set the world on the course of continuous interventions by states into each other’s domestic politics leading to the condition of permanent instability and the threat of total war.

Bratton updates Schmitt’s ideas for our era in which the control of infrastructure has superseded the occupation of territory as the route to power. Control over the nodes of  global networks, where assets are no longer measured in square miles, but in underwater cables, wireless towers, and satellites demands a distributed form of power, and hence helps explain the rise of multinational corporations to their current state of importance.

In terms of the Stack, these are the corporations that make up Bratton’s Cloud Layer, which include not only platforms such as Google and FaceBook, but the ISPs controlling much of the infrastructure upon which these companies (despite their best efforts to build such infrastructure themselves), continue to depend.

Bratton appears to see current geopolitics as a contest between two very different ideas regarding the future of the Cloud. There is the globalist vision found in Silicon Valley companies that aims to abandon the territorial limits of the nation-state and the Chinese model, which seeks to align the Cloud to the interests of the state. The first skirmish of this war Bratton notes was what he calls the Sino-Google War of 2009 in which Google under pressure from the Chinese government to censor its search results eventually withdrew from the country.

Unfortunately for Silicon Valley, along with those hoping we were witnessing the last gasp of the nation-state, not only did Google lose this war, it has recently moved to codify the terms of its surrender, while at the same time we have witnessed both a global resurgence of nationalism and the continuing role of the “deep-state” forcing the Cloud to conform to its interests.

Bratton also sees in the platform capitalism enabled by the Cloud the shape of a possible socialist future- a fulfillment of the dreams of rational, society-wide economic planning that was anticipated with the USSR’s Gosplan, and Project Cybersyn in pre-Pinochet Chile. The Stack isn’t the only book covering this increasingly important and interesting beat.

After the Cloud layer comes the City layer. It is in cities where the density of human population allows the technologies of the Stack to be most apparent. Cities, after all, are thick agglomerations of people and goods in motion all of which are looking for the most efficient path from point A to point B. Cities are composed privatized space made of innumerable walls that dictate entry and exit. They are the perfect laboratory for the logic and tools of the Stack. As Bratton puts it:

We recognize the city he describes as filled with suspicious responsive environments, from ATM PINs, to key cards and parking permits, e-tickets to branded entertainment, personalized recommendations from others who have purchased similar items, mobile social network transparencies, GPS-enabled monitoring of parolees, and customer phone tracking for retail layout optimization.  (p. 157)

Following the City layer we find the Address. In the Stack (or at least in the version of it dreamed up by salesmen for the Internet of Things), everything must have a location in the network, a link to which it can be connected to other persons and things. Something that lacks an address in some sense doesn’t exist for the Stack. An unconnected object or person fails to be a repository for information on which the Stack itself feeds.

We’ve only just entered the era in which our everyday objects speak to one another and in the process can reveal information we might have otherwise hidden about ourselves. What Bratton finds astounding is that in the Address layer we can see that the purpose of our communications infrastructure has become not for humans to communicate with other humans via machines, but for machines to communicate with other machines.

The next layer is that of the Interface. It is the world of programs and apps through which for most of us is the closest we get to code. Bratton says it better:

What are Apps? On the one hand, Apps are software applications and so operate within something like an application layer of a specific device-to-Cloud economy. However, because most of the real information processing is going on in the Cloud, and not in the device in your hand, the App is really more an interface to the real applications hidden away in data centers. As an interface, the App connects the remote device to oceans of data and brings those data to bear on the User’s immediate interests; as a data-gathering tool, the App sends data back to the central horde in response to how the User makes use of it. The App is also an interface between the User and his environment and the things within it, by aiding in looking, writing, subtitling, capturing, sorting, hearing, and linking things and events. (p.142)

The problem with apps is that they offer up an extremely narrow window on the world. Bratton is concerned about the political and social effects of such reality compression, a much darker version of Eli Pariser’s “filter bubble”, where the world itself is refracted into a shape that conforms to the individual’s particular fetishes, shattering a once shared social world.

The rise of filter bubbles are the first sign of a reality crisis Bratton thinks will only get worse with the perfection of augmented reality-there are already AR tours of the Grand Canyon that seek to prove creationism is true.

The Stack’s final layer is that of the User. Bratton here seems mainly concerned with expanding the definition of who or what constitutes one. There’s been a lot of hand-wringing about the use of bots since the 2016 election. California has even passed legislation to limit their use. Admittedly, these short, relatively easy to make programs that allow automated posts or calls are a major problem. Hell, over 90% of the phone calls I receive are now unsolicited robocalls, and given that I know I am not alone in this, such spam might just kill the phone call as a means of human communication. Ironically, the very reason we have cellphones in the first place.

Yet bots have also become the source of what many of us would consider not merely permissible, but desirable speech. It might upset me that countries like Russia and Saudi Arabia are vociferous users of bots to foster their interests among English speaking publics, or scammers using bots to pick people’s pockets, but I actually like the increasing use of bots by NGOs whose missions I support.

Bratton thus isn’t crazy for suggesting we give the bots some space in the form of “rights”. Things might move even further in this direction as bots become increasingly more sophisticated and personalized. Few would go so far as Jamie Susskind in his recent book Future Politics in suggesting we might replace representative government by a system of liquid democracy mediated by bots; one in which bots make political decisions for individuals based on the citizen’s preferences. But, here again, the proposal isn’t as ridiculous or reactionary as it might sound.

Given some issue to decide upon my bot could scan the position on the same by organizations and individuals I trust in regards to that issue. “My” votes on environmental policy could reflect some weighted measure between the views of the World Wildlife Fund, Bill Mckibben and the like, meaning I’d be more likely to make an informed vote than if I had pulled the lever on my own. This is not to say that I agree with this form of politics, or even believe it to be workable. Rather, I merely think that Bratton might be on to something here. That a key question in the User layer will be the place of bots- for good and ill.

The Stack, as Bratton has described it, is not without its problems and thus he ends his book with proposals for how we might build a better Stack. We could turn the Stack into a tool for the observation and management of the global environment. We could give Users design control over the interfaces that now dictate their lives, including the choice to enter and exit when we choose, a right that should be extended to the movement between states as well. We could use the power of platforms to revive something like centrally planned economies and their dream of eliminating waste and scarcity. We could harness the capacity of the Interface layer to build a world of plural utopias, extend and articulate the rights and responsibilities of users in a world full of bots.

Is Bratton right? Is this the world we are in, or at least headed towards. For my money, I think he gets some things spectacularly right, such as his explanation of the view of climate change within the political right:

“For those who would prefer neo-Feudalism and/or tooth-and-nail libertarianism, inaction on climate change is not denialism, rather it is action on behalf of a different strategic conclusion.” (p.306)

Yet, elsewhere I think his views are not only wrong, but sometimes contradictory. I think he largely misses how the Stack is in large part a product of American empire. He, therefore, misinterprets the 2009 spat between Google and China as a battle between two models of future politics, rather than seeing the current splintering of the internet for what it is: the emergence of peer competitors in the arena of information over which the US has for so long been a hegemon.

Bratton is also dismissive of privacy and enraptured by the Internet of Things in a way that can sometimes appear pollyannaish. After all, privacy isn’t just some antiquated right, but one of the few ways to keep hackable systems secure. That he views the IoT as something inevitable and almost metaphysical, rather than the mere marketing it so often is, leads me to believe he really hasn’t thought through what it means to surround ourselves with computers- that is to make everything in our environment hackable. Rather than being destined to plug everything into everything else, we may someday discover that this is not only unnecessary and dangerous, but denotes a serious misunderstanding of what computation is actually for.

Herein lies my main problem with the Stack: though radically different than Yuval Harari, Bratton too seems to have drank the Silicon Valley Kool Aid.  The Stack takes as its assumption that the apps flowing out of the likes of FaceBook and Google and the infrastructure behind them are not merely of world-historical, but of cosmic import. Matter is rearranging itself into a globe spanning intelligence with unlikely seeds like a Harvard nerd who wanted a website to rate hot-chicks. I just don’t buy it.

What I do buy is that the Stack as a concept, or something like it, will be a necessary tool for negotiating our era, where the borders between politics and technology have become completely blurred. One can imagine a much less loquacious and more reality-based version of Bratton’s book that used his layers to give us a better grasp of this situation. In the Earth layer we’d see the imperialism behind the rare-earth minerals underlying our technology, we’d see massive Chinese factories like those of FoxConn, the way in which earth destroying coal continues to be the primary energy source for the Stack.

In the Cloud layer we’d gain insight into server farms and monopolistic ISPs such as Comcast, and come to understand the fight over Net Neutrality. We’d be shown the contours of the global communications infrastructure and the way in which these are plugged into and policed by government actors such as the NSA.

In the City layer we’d interrogate idea of smart cities, along with the automation of inequality and digitization of citizenship along with exploring the role of computation in global finance. In the Address layer we’d uncover the scope of logistics and  find out how platforms such as Amazon work their magic, and ask whether it really was magic or just parasitism, and how we might use these insights for the public good, whether that meant nationalizing the platforms or breaking them into pieces.

In the User layer we’d take a hard look at the addictive psychology behind software, the owners and logic behind well-known companies such as FaceBook along with less well known such as MindGeek. Such an alternative version of the Stack, would not only better inform us as to what the Stack is, but suggest what we might actually do to build ourselves a better one.  

 

Why the Global Brain needs a Therapist

Gaia Greek Mythology

The idea that the world itself could be considered an overarching form of mind can trace its roots deep into the religious longings of pantheism- the idea that the universe itself is God, or the closest thing we will ever find to our conception of God. In large part, I find pantheists to be a noble group. Any club that might count as its members a philosophical giant like Spinoza, a paradigm shattering genius such as Einstein, or a songbird like Whitman I would be honored to belong to myself. But alas, I have my doubts about pantheism- at least in particular its contemporary manifestation in the form of our telecommunications and computer networks being granted the status of an embryonic “global brain”. I wish it were so, but all the evidence seems to point in the other direction.

Key figures in this idea that our communications networks might constitute the neural passageways of a great collective brain predate the Internet by more than a generation. The great prophet of sentience emerging from our ever growing and intertwined communications networks was the Jesuit Priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. He stated it this way:

We are faced with a harmonized collectivity of consciousness, the equivalent of a sort of super-consciousness. The idea is that of the earth becoming enclosed in a single thinking envelope, so as to form, functionally, no more than a single vast grain of thought on the cosmic scale …

A more dystopian take on this was brought to us via the genius of Arthur C. Clarke in his 1961 short- “Dial F for Frankenstein” in which the telephone network “wakes up” and predictable chaos ensues. Only one year later the poetic and insightful Marshall Mcluhan gave us a view mixed with utopian and dystopian elements. We were weaving ourselves together into what Mcluhan called a “global village” filled both the intimacy and terror that was the hallmark of pre-literate societies. De Chardin  looked to evolution as the source of comparison to the emergence of his “Noosphere”, Mcluhan looked to the human brain. We had, he thought, “extended our central nervous system in a global embrace, abolishing space and time as far as our planet is concerned.”

 The phrase “global brain” itself would have to await until the 1980s and the New Age philosopher Peter Russell. Russell pushed the analogy between telecommunications networks and and the human brain even deeper managing to fuse together the two major views of the meaning of our telecommunications networks: Chardin’s evolutionary analogy with Mcluhan’s view of telecommunications networks as a nascent global brain. Russell saw the emergence of the human brain itself as an evolutionary leap towards even more interconnectivity- a property of the universe that had been growing at least since the appearance of life and reaching an apogee with the new computer networks tying individuals together.

In a period of rising communications across the nascent Internet, Russell held that the 10 billion neural connections of the human brain represented a phase change in the evolution of consciousness that would be replicated when the projected persons living on earth in the early 21st century would themselves be connected to one another via computer networks giving rise to a true “global brain”. With the age of the Internet just beginning, Russell would soon have company.

During the heady early 1990’s when the Internet was exploding into public consciousness the idea that a global brain was emerging from the ether graced the pages of tech mags such as Wired. There, journalists such as Jennifer Cobb Kreisberg could quote without any hint of suspicion Internet gurus like John Perry Barlow to the effect that:

We stand today at the beginning of Teilhard’s third phase of evolution, the moment at which the world is covered with the incandescent glow of consciousness. Teilhard characterized this as “evolution becoming conscious of itself.” The Net, that great collectivizer of minds, is the primary tool for our emergence into the third phase. “With cyberspace, we are, in effect, hard-wiring the collective consciousness,” says Barlow.

In 2002 Francis Heylighen of the Free University of Brussels could state his hopes for the emerging global brain this way:

The global brain will moreover help eliminate conflicts. It in principle provides a universal channel through which people from all countries, languages and cultures of this world can communicate. This will make it easier to reduce mutual ignorance and misunderstandings, or discuss and resolve differences of opinion. The greater ease with which good ideas can spread over the whole planet will make it easier to reach global consensus about issues that concern everybody. The free flow of information will make it more difficult for authoritarian regimes to plan suppression or war. The growing interdependence will stimulate collaboration, while making war more difficult. The more efficient economy will indirectly reduce the threat of conflict, since there will be less competition for scarce resources.

The Global Brain/Mind is one of those rare ideas in history that prove resilient whatever happens in the real world. 9-11 did not diminish Heylighen’s enthusiasm for the idea, which shouldn’t be surprising because neither did anything that occurred in the decade that followed his 2002 essay; including, the invasion of Iraq, the global economic crisis, failure to tackle world impacting phenomena such as climate change, increasing tensions between states, rapidly climbing economic inequality, or the way in which early 21st century global revolutions have played out to date. The hope that our networks will “wake up” and give rise to something like Chardin’s “Omega Point” continues to be widely popular in technology circles, both in the Kurzweilian Singularity variety and even in guises more aligned with traditional religious thinking such as that expounded by the Christian Kevin Kelly in his recent book What Technology Wants.

Part of the problem with seeing our telecommunications networks and especially the Internet as an embryonic form of global brain is that the idea of what exactly a brain is seems stuck in time and has not kept up with the findings of contemporary neuroscience. Although his actual meaning was far more nuanced, Mcluhan’s image of a “global village” suggests a world shrunk to a comfortably small size where all human being stand in the relation of “neighbors” to one another.

The meaning would have been much different had Mcluhan chosen the image of a refugee camp or the city of Oran from Albert Camus’ novel, The Plague. Like the community in Stephen King’s new TV production Under the Dome, Camus’ imagined Oran is hermetically sealed off from the outside world. A self-contained entity that is more a form of suffocation than community.

Much more than Mcluhan, thinkers such as Russell, Barlow or Heylighen see in the evolution of a single entity an increase of unity. The deepening of our worldwide communication networks will in Heylighen’s words “help eliminate conflicts”, and “make it easier to reach global consensus”. This idea that the creation of one entity embracing all the world’s peoples along with the belief that the development of self-awareness by this network is the threshold event both stem from an antiquated understanding of neuroscience. The version of the human brain proponents of the global brain hope the world’s telecommunications networks evolves into is a long discredited picture from the 1960’s, 70’s and 80’s. If the Internet and our other networks are evolving towards some brain like state it’s pretty important that we have an accurate picture of how the brain actually works.

As far as popular tours through the ganglia of contemporary neuroscience are concerned,none is perhaps better than David Eagleman’s Incognito The Secret Lives of the Brain.  In Incognito, Eagleman shows us how neuroscience has upended one of the deepest of Western assumptions – that of the unity of the self. Here he is in an interview on NPR’s Fresh Air:

EAGLEMAN: Yeah. Intuitively, it feels like there’s a you. So when somebody meets Terry Gross, they feel like: Oh, yeah, that’s one person. But in fact, it turns out what we have under the hood are lots of neural populations, lots of neural networks that are all battling it out to control your behavior.

And it’s exactly a parliament, in the sense that these different political parties might disagree with one another. They’re like a team of rivals in this way, to borrow Kearns Goodwin’s phrase of this. They’re like a team of rivals in that they all feel they know the best way to steer the nation, and yet they have different ways of going about it, just like different political parties do.

You need not be Ulysses who had himself strapped to the stern of his ship so that he could both listen to the song of the Sirens and resist their murderous call to have some intuitive sense of divisions within the self. Anyone who has resisted the urge to hit the snooze button one more time understands this. What is remarkable is how deep modern neuroscience has revealed these internal divisions to be. A person need not suffer Dissociative Disorder with multiple personalities or be a drug addict. The internal rivalry over who we really are is manifest in every decision where we feel pulled in two or more directions at once.

The related idea that Eagleman tries to convey in Incognito is just how small a role self-awareness plays in the workings of the human brain. The vast majority of what the brain does is actually outside of the perception of the consciousness. Indeed, one of the primary roles of self- consciousness is to learn new stuff only to bury it outside of conscious access where further interference from the self-conscious brain will only end up screwing things up. Once you know how to play the piano, ride a bike, or tie your shoelaces actually thinking about it is sure to turn you into a klutz. It’s not even that the self-conscious part of the brain is like George W. Bush “the decider” of our actions. It’s more like the news report of whatever neural faction within us has its hold on the reins of power. Like journalists in general, the self-conscious “I” thinks itself more important than those actually calling the shots.

What is perhaps surprising is that this updated version of the human brain actually does look a lot like the “global mind” we actually have, if not the one we want. The equivalent of the brain’s “neural populations” are the rivalrous countries, corporations,terrorist organizations, criminal groups, NGOs, cooperating citizens and others who populate the medium of the internet. Rival, and not so rival, as in the recent case of the US spying on EU officials, states, use the internet as a weapon of espionage and “cyber war” corporations battle one another for market share, terrorist and criminal entities square off against states and each other. NGOs and some citizen groups try to use the Internet to leverage efforts to make the world a better place.

As for this global brain, such as it is, obtaining self-awareness: if self-awareness plays such a small role in human cognition, why should we expect it to be such a defining feature of any “true” global brain? As Eagleman makes clear, the reason that the human brain exhibits self-awareness is largely a matter of its capacity to learn new things. The job of self-awareness is to make this learning unconscious like the pre- programmed instincts and regulatory functions of the body. Only once they are unconscious is their performance actually efficient. If any global brain follows the pattern of the one between our ears the more efficient it is- the less self-aware it will be.

This understanding of how the brain works has counter-intuitive, and what I think to be largely unexplored implications outside of the question of any global brain. Take the issue of uploading. The idea behind uploading is that our minds are a kind of software where our thoughts and memories can be uploaded offering us a form of immortality. Uploading seems to necessitate its flip-side of downloading as well. In the future if I want to learn how to play the oboe instead of painful practice I will be able to download into my mind all the skills needed to play and in a flash I’ll be hitting out the tunes like Jack Cozen Harel.

Our current understand of the brain seems to throw a wrench into uploading and downloading as far as thoughts are concerned. For one, the plural nature of the brain leaves one wondering which of our neural populations make into into the afterword or whether they should make it through as one entity at all? The gregarious part of myself has never like the introverted bookworm. At death, maybe before, why not make the divorce final and let the two go their separate ways?

Seeing the downloading of thoughts in light of contemporary neuroscience opens up other interesting questions as well. If our self-awareness is most in play when we are going through the tedious steps of learning something new perhaps we should describe it as a slow bandwidth phenomenon? An increase in the efficiency in getting new things into our heads may come at the cost of self-awareness. The more machine like we become the less self-aware we will be.

Those are interesting questions for another time. To return to the global brain: Eagleman made use of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s characterization of Lincoln’s cabinet as “a team of rivals”. With the Civil War fresh in our memories, perhaps we could extend the analogy to say that recent efforts by countries such as China to de-internationalize, or de-Americanize the Internet are something like the beginning of a movement to “secede” from the global brain itself.  As a pre-publication review of Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen’s The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business:

Ultimately, Schmidt and Cohen even foresee the possibility of the world’s countries deliberately breaking the Internet into several distinct Internets. According to Gara’s reading of the book, the authors “speculate that the Internet could eventually fracture into pieces, some controlled by an alliance of states that are relatively tolerant and free, and others by groupings that want their citizens to take part in a less rowdy and open online life.

Whether such a fracturing would constitute the sort of deep loss Schmidt and Cohen present it as or something much less dire depends on how one values the global brain as it exists today. As I see it, our networks are nowhere near the sort of sentient and essential globe spanning consciousness the global brain’s most vocal advocates wish it to be.

We do, however, have hints of what such a true global brain might look like in things like IBM’s Smart Cities Initiative which allows cities like New York and Rio to get instant feedback from their citizens along with a network of sensors that allow these cities to respond accordingly and target their services.

Yet, what makes something like Smart Cities work is that this feedback is plugged into services and governance with clear paths of response. A similar network of sensors and feedback systems that instead spanned the earth itself would need somewhere to be plugged into. A brain needs a body, but where? As of yet our tools of global governance are not even up to the information steaming from the limited global brain we have. This would allow us to, among much else, not just monitor but care for our earth. To take on the responsibilities of the terrestrial, if not cosmic, adults we are.

As long as we hold that there is some degree of similarity between the network under our skulls and the network civilization we have been constructing since the first telegraph message in 1844- “What hath God wrought?”, then we need to update our understanding of what a global brain would actually be. This needs to be based both on current neuroscience and where our networks are themselves trending in addition to our commitment to actually heed what such networks might tell us. To do otherwise is to be blinded to the truth by our deep longing for a pantheist deity: hugging close like the earth- mother of a child’s fable.