Philosophical discussion on latency, networks, and cultural references

indefinable, opposite of loneliness.”2°” The early interface of Snapchat, where you had to leave your finger resting on the screen in order for the video to unspool, was a kind of metaphor for this unbreakable relationship between touch and connection. (As was, in a different way, the diffident “out of my life” left swipe of Tinder.) “Good theories of the mind,” Hillis’ mentory Marvin Minksy once observed, “must span at least three different scales of time: slow, for the billion years in which our brains have evolved; fast, for the fleeting weeks and months of infancy and childhood; and in between, the centuries of growth of our ideas through history.”2°8 What we face now is a new time scale to add to Minksy’s list: The instant. Super-fast networks are different than slower ones - even ones as “slow” as what we have today. The ideal network is one that hovers near zero latency, where the time between what you want (or what the machines want) and the effect is as short as possible. You click a button to watch a movie and it starts instantly. You want to shut down an enemy air force, you do it with a single switch. The fantasy of a really “zero latency” system is impossible of course because even electrons moving through copper are not instant, but near-zero? Light-speed? You've probably heard stories of high-frequency stock traders who move next door to exchanges so they can capture and profit on an extra sliver of a millisecond. That’s the quest for low latency. (And more proof of the profitable link between speed and money.) Our challenge will not be about being faster - the technology will make that inevitable - it will be about managing the insane, still unknown demands of a world of suddenness. “In a distributed system, it is sometimes impossible to say that one of two events occurred first,” computer engineer Leslie Lamport wrote at the start of his famous essay “Time, Clocks and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System” - a sort of technological parallel to Simmel’s “The Metropolis and Mental Life” written a century earlier. The problem, Lamport explains, is that what happens in one place can happen nearly instantly everywhere. There’s no time to react; so your entire worldview has to be capable of update at an instant’s notice. When the time between a Warez Dude finding an exploit and your own systems being compromised is zero, then the discovery of the hole and the creation of your vulnerability happen effectively at the same time. “The relation ‘happened before’”, Lamport explains, “is therefore only a partial ordering of the events in the system. We have found that problems often arise because people are not fully aware of this fact and its implications.” 2°9 Networks, we are discovering, don’t only compress space and time, they are compressing in the process the path to knowledge. We might call this “skill-time compression”: Techniques that once took a decade of training or that demanded access to million-dollar machines, can now be understood, applied, and then evolved 207 “More than finding”: Marina Keegan, The Opposite of Lonelinenss”, Yale Daily News, May 27, 2012 (accessed online). 208 “Good theories”: Marvin Minsky, The Society of Mind (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986) 209 "In a distributed system”: Leslie Lamport, “Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System”, Communications of the ACM, July 1978, 558 143 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018375