So, you were just curious. What’s that hotel in Las Vegas look like? In the ensuing days you see advertising not only for that hotel, but also for similar hotels in Las Vegas, all the ads popping up when you click onto your search engine. You seem trapped in Cyberspace, but you understand that a consequence of being connected to every avenue of information also connects others to you, to your needs, and to your wants. Check out a new car. Bing! There’s an ad for it the next time you log on. You entered a strong vortex (likely a number of vortices). You were just one click away from millions of powerful and attracting Emerald Cities whose Ozes could read your mind and quantify your personality.
There are those who use your click to profile you. Political parties spend tens of millions of dollars on predictive modeling. They want to know you personally, the stuff you like, the stuff you want, the teams you follow, the clothes you buy, and… everything. Companies throughout the world know you, also. Algorithms put it all together for them and for anyone out there who wants to predict what you’ll do next. You are swept up by predictive modeling, and there’s no stopping the process short of a complete disruption of the world’s electronic systems and the end of the universe.
Numbers. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. It isn’t that you are “just a number” in an impersonal world; it’s that you are a number point. In Cyberspace you stand in relation to all the other number points in a way that is both definite and predictable. You’re not a mystery. Does that bother you? You are a number the way the ancient Pythagoreans thought of numbers, grouped by shape to make a geometry that is understandable.* Me, too.
But it’s the choice you and I made to trade some of our Earth space for Cyberspace. We stand in two different kinds of places. Both are real, but neither has the reality of the other. Both affect us. But in Cyberspace you are both an abstraction of sorts, pulled off the solid ground, made ethereal, and placed in the predictive models run by the millions to see what to make of you based on a click here or there; and you are the one who will act in the other reality on what you click.
You’re not Dorothy, unfortunately. You probably can’t click your heels to get back to a physical “Kansas” once you enter the algorithm of an Emerald City. Part of you, even if you go underground to get away from Cyberspace, will remain there in that other reality for as long as electrons run through wires and microwaves run through the universe. In a click you dropped out of the sky into a different reality, maybe even a stronger reality than the one you have in any “Kansas.” In the reality of places on Earth you and I will come and go, possibly lingering only as long as those who know us and then, after our going, knew us until they, too, leave this place. But in the other place, the Cyberplace, the model of you will ride electrons till the sun envelopes our planet and still will ride microwaves until, in the unknown distant future, the flat universe itself, the Place of places, disappears into nothingness.
*Triangular numbers:
.
. . .
1 . , 3 . . , 6 . . . , and so on…
Square numbers also begin with one dot, but then accumulate in squares of four dots, nine, twelve, and so on…
You can guess the pentagonal numbers make a pentagon that grows into larger and larger pentagons with more dots, and hexagons grow the same way. Pythagorean numbers were initially collections of entities (like marbles) arranged in geometric shapes. Eventually, as Morris Kline points out in Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty, p. 13 (Fall River Press, 1980), the Pythagoreans “understood numbers as abstract concepts, whereas objects were merely concrete realizations of numbers.” Are you the “concrete realization” of the predictive modeling numbers of Cyberspace algorithms?
There are those who use your click to profile you. Political parties spend tens of millions of dollars on predictive modeling. They want to know you personally, the stuff you like, the stuff you want, the teams you follow, the clothes you buy, and… everything. Companies throughout the world know you, also. Algorithms put it all together for them and for anyone out there who wants to predict what you’ll do next. You are swept up by predictive modeling, and there’s no stopping the process short of a complete disruption of the world’s electronic systems and the end of the universe.
Numbers. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. It isn’t that you are “just a number” in an impersonal world; it’s that you are a number point. In Cyberspace you stand in relation to all the other number points in a way that is both definite and predictable. You’re not a mystery. Does that bother you? You are a number the way the ancient Pythagoreans thought of numbers, grouped by shape to make a geometry that is understandable.* Me, too.
But it’s the choice you and I made to trade some of our Earth space for Cyberspace. We stand in two different kinds of places. Both are real, but neither has the reality of the other. Both affect us. But in Cyberspace you are both an abstraction of sorts, pulled off the solid ground, made ethereal, and placed in the predictive models run by the millions to see what to make of you based on a click here or there; and you are the one who will act in the other reality on what you click.
You’re not Dorothy, unfortunately. You probably can’t click your heels to get back to a physical “Kansas” once you enter the algorithm of an Emerald City. Part of you, even if you go underground to get away from Cyberspace, will remain there in that other reality for as long as electrons run through wires and microwaves run through the universe. In a click you dropped out of the sky into a different reality, maybe even a stronger reality than the one you have in any “Kansas.” In the reality of places on Earth you and I will come and go, possibly lingering only as long as those who know us and then, after our going, knew us until they, too, leave this place. But in the other place, the Cyberplace, the model of you will ride electrons till the sun envelopes our planet and still will ride microwaves until, in the unknown distant future, the flat universe itself, the Place of places, disappears into nothingness.
*Triangular numbers:
.
. . .
1 . , 3 . . , 6 . . . , and so on…
Square numbers also begin with one dot, but then accumulate in squares of four dots, nine, twelve, and so on…
You can guess the pentagonal numbers make a pentagon that grows into larger and larger pentagons with more dots, and hexagons grow the same way. Pythagorean numbers were initially collections of entities (like marbles) arranged in geometric shapes. Eventually, as Morris Kline points out in Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty, p. 13 (Fall River Press, 1980), the Pythagoreans “understood numbers as abstract concepts, whereas objects were merely concrete realizations of numbers.” Are you the “concrete realization” of the predictive modeling numbers of Cyberspace algorithms?
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