Conflating the Mass and Velocity of Ideas
Originally published in Lethal Minds Volume 15
Conflating the Mass and Velocity of Ideas – Dr. Kane Tomlin
Dr. Kane Tomlin is a former US Army Master Diver, Special Programs Director for the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, and the current IT Security Officer of the Mississippi Department of Health. Kane has deployed twice to Iraq (in 2006-07-08 & 2010-11) and has worked extensively around the globe while a member of the Army’s Engineer Dive Teams. Kane’s research specialty is organized group violence. You can follow Kane at the Good Idea Fairy Substack.
Melvin Kranzberg first debuted his Six Laws of Technology at a software conference in 1985. His First Law states: “Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral” [1]. Fast forward eight years to the beginning of the internet era (roughly 1993) and beyond, and many of us have apparently forgotten or conflated the complex interrelationships between technology and the people who create and use it. The combination of technological progress and human decisions and reactions to it does not change the fundamental nature of humanity, something C.S. Lewis was fond of calling “Chronological Snobbery”, aka the mindset that somehow modern humans are superior in intelligence to our ancestors by virtue of society’s advancements, often thought of as the “appeal to novelty fallacy” [2]. Technological advances themselves tend to provide humanity with various cognitive illusions. In this article, I’m specifically addressing the illusion of ideation and information control. We live in an era of pervasive technological oversight and that tends to give leaders the impression of complete situational awareness and the corresponding command and control ability that is more often than not completely unrealistic [3, 4]. The advent of the globalized internet gave humans information at the “speed of send”, but speed alone is not a panacea for our society’s modern idea merchants. Many of our leaders, our system designers, and our talking head/media classes seem to think that technology itself provides them the capability and mandate to push ideas from the top down at a global scale, while simultaneously preventing the spread of bad ones. In reality, I tend to think the “idea importing/exporting systems” we have today more closely approximate the gravitational systems we have always had, and that ideas are pulled from various sources based on their attractiveness to their audiences. This confounding of push versus pull in systematic thinking is widespread and damaging to our institutions.
In The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium, Martin Gurri captures a dynamic that seemingly eludes many of our political, technical, and academic elites. He postulates that widespread internet access democratizes information, facilitating an “instantaneous pull” system, which now competes in the same space as traditional media’s “push system.” In Gurri’s telling, masses are now able to puncture the narratives pushed from above that may have once unified our society through our formalized institutions. Due to the cost of idea dissemination, gatekeepers were thought of as indispensable middlemen, in the same way, distributors were required by our pre-internet logistical system to keep local shops stocked with inventory.
When e-commerce interrupted that business model, the middlemen gatekeepers were suddenly deprived of their power, influence, and income. Our idea gatekeepers are experiencing a similar disruption. These idea gatekeepers have responded to this development, by doubling down. While trying to tighten their grip on information and narrative formation, they are exacerbating popular distrust of their institutions and fueling a spiral of nihilism [5]. Originally published in 2014, Gurri’s prophetic book predated the election of Donald Trump and Brexit, two world-shaking upheavals that confirmed his central thesis. Now, on an almost weekly basis, news stories pop up that further demonstrate his prescience. Although I argue the systemic nature of “idea mass” predates the internet, perhaps chronological snobbery gets us all at some point. In contrast to Gurri, I argue idea spread was always a pull system, but the cost of entry was simply too high for many would-be idea generators to operate without a gatekeeper’s patronage.
Technology alone has not and cannot fundamentally change humanity itself in just the span of a few years or even a few thousand years, nor is technology immune to the impact of human decisions about it [6]. The funding mechanism of TV development for example dramatically impacted how the Internet was monetized through advertising. Technology cannot be neutral because human decisions have impacts on how technology is funded, resourced, developed, and ultimately commercialized. For example, TV technology’s funding mechanism of selling commercials directly impacted the development of web-based technology and ultimately led to the internet’s ubiquitous data collection systems as a means to sustain its advertising revenue [6]. This confounding assumption is especially true today in organizations that are typically slower to adapt to existential competitive forces, for instance, the government. As an aside, note how many historical government innovations are the result of warfare, one of the few times when the government has a direct competitor forcing it to innovate [7].
To fully understand the government’s current self-described “Information Operations” related challenges, it is worth comparing them to the private sector’s challenges circa 1996-2000 with the disruptive technology called the Internet. Prior to the dot-com era, technological development itself had the exact same distribution problems as your local Walmart, namely that once the technology product was complete, it had to be packaged, distributed, installed, etc. each and every time a new capability was added to a system. The pace of software innovation was still being measured in years. When internet applications became possible, a single distribution point was suddenly possible, and desirable. Now, the execution of strategy could harness this technology limited only by the pace of innovation, not distribution. Older client-server models of adaptation were now far too slow to compete. Web-based applications meant that the speed of human adoption became the main limit to technical evolution.
Every person who logs into Amazon, for example, is getting the absolute latest and greatest version of their web-based application’s technological offering, and new features can be released at any time (or all the time). What started as a simple online bookstore now has streaming media, AI-enabled assistants, smart speakers, mobile applications, their own distribution network, etc. Private businesses suddenly became subject to complex problems instead of merely complicated ones, and the ability to create useful and reasonable models broke down. Complicated problems have a finite number of variables that can be mastered, such as manufacturing a motor vehicle. In contrast, complex problems like predicting the weather have so many unknown variables that at best all we can do is a statistical best guess. A collection of early lessons learned from this internet era is the now infamous document called “The Agile Manifesto” published in 2001 [7, 8]. There is a lot of good material included in the agile methodologies first documented in the manifesto, but one of the most important - though technically left unstated in the document - changes to organizational culture that resulted from its adoption was the conceptual movement from push systems of work to pull systems of work.
Push systems of work are organizational systems where ideas start at the top of the organization, while the work necessary to implement these ideas gets “pushed” down from the thinker level to the doer level of the organization. The problem with push systems of work is that they are limited to the speed and understanding of leadership, a group both small and historically risk-averse. In contrast, pull systems of work recognize that ideas themselves have mass in an essentially gravitational sense. To put the point another way, idea mass is the attractiveness of ideas themselves. Idea mass is the recognition from agile methodologies that the “doers of the work” will usually gravitate to some of the most attractive ideas (larger mass) themselves and literally pull the work down from the “to-do list” which we tend to call the backlog. There’s more to agile than this concept obviously, but there is a river of digital ink available to those who wish to learn more.
When one thinks of ideas as having their own mass, one can better visualize some of these pull processes in action. Ideas were propagated for tens of thousands of years or more before the advent of the internet. The Founding Fathers of the United States reached back to ideas first outlined in ancient Greece and Rome when developing their ideas about government as outlined in the Declaration of Independence. Those ideas were referenced again in another document called the Constitution, and they seemed to survive the pre-internet era fine enough. So, if idea mass is not technologically dependent, then why do many in modern government think that technology itself is a major causal variable to the spread of misinformation? Why the sudden urgency or frustration around the ideas themselves? By conflating idea mass with idea velocity, the government is trying to control “misinformation” by attempting to use technology itself against human nature, which is a fool’s errand. Technology does not create the mass of an idea; what it can do is increase the velocity of an idea. I use the term velocity in lieu of speed because velocity is the combination of both speed and direction. Ideas do not spread equally in all directions because of technology. In fact, ideas are ultimately pulled by someone along a technological channel of some sort, and in turn, the idea’s mass may alter the velocity of the thinker themselves if the mass is great enough.
Like the US Constitution, the spread of competing religions in the pre- and post-internet era tells us something important about idea systems. Idea mass is at best morally neutral; and, based on our evolutionary psychology, morally bad ideas may even have more mass than morally good ideas, depending on one’s definition of morality [9]. Many of the world’s most popular religions operate in direct moral competition with each other. If idea mass were based solely on what society collectively deemed moral, then we might expect a single religion, encompassing the one moral center mass of humanity, would have emerged in response to our global idea-sharing mechanisms now at the internet scale. So far that appears elusive. Idea mass may not technically be coextensive with its moral value, but we can at least conclude idea mass is an expression of attractiveness. In contrast, what technology is good at is increasing the velocity (speed and direction) of ideas because, as Isaac Newton insinuated, mass multiplied by acceleration is where things get interesting and important.
Technology development and its relationship to the velocity of ideas also has a long and disruptive history. Consider the printing press (30 Years’ War), radio (World War 1), motion picture film (World War 2) television (Vietnam War), and now the internet (insert the contemporary war of your choice here). Where we seem to be getting into trouble now is with our current information gatekeepers in government, media, and no internet platforms in wide usage. Gatekeepers by definition want to have control over which ideas should be afforded mass. But mass is not technically related or therefore technically manageable, velocity is. Gatekeepers appear to be cognitively trapped in attempts to keep the information push system relevant in a pull system environment. One might even argue that the gatekeeper model is simply unrealistic, doubling down on a system when the expected results vary from the intended ones. It’s a variation of the sunk cost fallacy. Gatekeepers can and do attempt to combat misinformation by creating additional “better” content, but when they attempt to instead remove or block the “bad content”, they tend to lower institutional trust and as often as not, end up spotlighting the very idea they were trying to sideline.
Having made it this far, one can apply this pull model to this article itself. This idea of mine has a mass equivalent to at least nine paragraphs worth of your time, regardless of the channel on which you are reading about it. However, the velocity of this article is being facilitated by various technologies like the internet, maybe a printer (if you like to read on paper), and some kind of technical device like a phone or computer that allows you to have received this article much faster than via the mail, and possibly you pull it to you from your preferred channel, instead of having it pushed to you via email. However the velocity of an idea does not cause the mass of the idea. I argue that if and when gatekeepers try to control idea mass, they are simply restricting a single communication channel. If the idea mass of that channel is lower than the idea mass of a competing channel, then idea consumers will simply switch channels. Gatekeepers may be better served instead by engaging in the debate in a manner reminiscent of the earliest US newspapers, which were partisan affairs to be sure, but transparent ones. Some, like my hometown paper the Tallahassee Democrat, and the Detroit Free Press (originally The Democratic Free Press and Michigan Intelligencer) survive today.
I had originally planned to push specific governmental policies to this challenging informational system, but I think that might defeat the purpose of this think piece. Pardon the pun, but I’m purposefully trying to stay as generic as I can be because my goal is to simply use my idea’s mass to potentially alter your thinking velocity in the hopes that the readers will fill in the details as they see fit. Many attempts to describe “what is” can turn into “what should be” which could defeat the point. However, I will share some of my experiences with such a conceptual model. In situations where I think someone’s idea might have factually incorrect elements, I try to focus on the fact or facts that I think are provably incorrect and hope that the inferences of that factual misinformation on one’s conclusion will speak for themselves. Misinformation is not an incorrect idea or perspective in my mind (well, I try anyway, I am a creature of the same systems with my own biases), as much as it is the inclusion of incorrect facts that might have led one to an unrealistic conclusion. Disinformation in this context is purposefully spreading such “bad data” even when the spreader knows it is provably false, which is malicious behavior to be sure. However, it is one that cannot be easily regulated without clearly knowing whether the intent is ignorant or malicious.
1. Kranzberg, M., Technology and history:" Kranzberg's laws". Technology and culture, 1986. 27(3): p. 544-560.
2. Lindsley, A., CS Lewis on Chronological Snobbery. Knowing and Doing, 2003: p. 1-3.
3. McChrystal, S.A., et al., Team of teams : new rules of engagement for a complex world. 2015, New York, New York: Portfolio/Penguin. ix, 290 pages.
4. 2014 Maneuver Warfighter Conference - General Stanley McChrystal. 2014, Benning TV. p. 41:00.
5. Gurri, M., The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium. 2018: Stripe Press.
6. Wiggins, C. and M. Jones, How Data Happened: A History from the Age of Reason to the Age of Algorithms. 2023, New York, NY: WW Norton and Co.
7. Mowery, D.C., Military R&D and innovation, in Handbook of the Economics of Innovation. 2010, Elsevier. p. 1219-1256.
8. Beck, K., et al., The agile manifesto. 2001, The Agile Alliance, www. agilemanifesto. org.
9. Robertson, C.E., et al., Negativity drives online news consumption. Nature Human Behaviour, 2023.