My thunder, stolen:

That’s why you find people saying things like, “Neural networks are decentralized, just like democracies” or “Neural networks are emergent, just like capitalism“.

A summary of the Standard Prepackaged Revolutionary New [REDACTED] Paradigm might look like the following—and when reading, ask yourself how many of these ideas are affectively laden:

• The Dark Side is Top-Down. The Light Side is Bottom-Up.
• The Dark Side is Centralized. The Light Side is Distributed.
• The Dark Side is Logical. The Light Side is Fuzzy.
• The Dark Side is Serial. The Light Side is Parallel.
• The Dark Side is Rational. The Light Side is Intuitive.
• The Dark Side is Deterministic. The Light Side is Stochastic.
• The Dark Side tries to Prove things. The Light Side tries to Test them.
• The Dark Side is Hierarchical. The Light Side is Heterarchical.
• The Dark Side is Clean. The Light Side is Noisy.
• The Dark Side operates in Closed Worlds. The Light Side operates in Open Worlds.
• The Dark Side is Rigid. The Light Side is Flexible.
• The Dark Side is Sequential. The Light Side is Realtime.
• The Dark Side demands Control and Uniformity. The Light Side champions Freedom and Individuality.
• The Dark Side is Lawful. The Light Side, on the other hand, is Creative.

By means of this tremendous package deal fallacy, lots of good feelings are generated about the New Idea (even if it’s thirty years old).

(Over Coming Bias, via Groupuscule. It has nothing to do with Star Wars)

This could be about the hippie vision of the Web, where everyone is a blogger and all YouTube videos are invaluable contributions to culture. It could be about the gloabl brain idea/”metaphor”. It could be about the vaguely post-y romance of revolutionary politics. It could be about opensource. It could be about decentralized, vaguely Deleuzian capitalism. It could be about the upheval of human selfhood brought about by a materialist approach to the brain. Any of these subjects could be what I redacted from that second paragraph. But it’s not about any of those things. Well, it is, but not specifically.

It’s about Artificial Intelligence. This series of fixations, this sort of “affective reasoning,” this particular and peculiar bias (that I exhibit as much as anyone) manifests frequently in many diverse places. It was that last sentence, the thought of a pattern to thought across domains, that made me change this from a tumblr post to an entry here.

The places where this issue crops up have something in common. If not exactly what one would call “the human sciences” just yet, then a collection that might be analgously categorized in the near future.

Here I found myself about to write that the open question was whether the above morality for thought (the author might have been thinking in terms of a hypothetical machine’s thought rather than our own but little matter, that) is more than a trend—whether it was significant on a historical register. But if the impulse is to make sense of things and decide their significance is always and only in terms of history, then another morality still haunts those “human sciences” (and thinking about all this falls within that general area and certainly seems a bit stuck within a history-based paradigm). So much so that it seems very difficult and often very wrong to think in any other way.

Perhaps this isn’t so for the expanded universe of human sciences. Particularly when it comes to a focus on the brain and things like brains there’s much less of need (or feeling of a need) to put everything in terms of History than in the case of the economy or politics. Indeed, the linguist has often derided the idea that there’s much to learn from language by looking at the history of how it’s been understood. Then again, he (and his field) hardly seems paradigmatic of the New Revolutionary Paradigm outlined above…

Programing note: In yet another effort at making this “blog” into… anything, I’ve just had to accept that a lot of posts will end rather unsatisfyingly in ellipses. Or programming notes.

Or promises to continue later in another direction. In this case, what the geistiness of networks might have to do with the authenticity paradigm and the problems presented by their seeming opposition to one another. Hint: are cities light side or dark side?

In response to a recent tumbl I was asked whether is was ever OK not to worry about the “Grim Meathook Future.” The answer, I believe, is no. More importantly though, the question has finally prompted me to get on with this project. The concept of the GMF might not be the best vehicle to explain myself, but it seems to be one that works.

Some might not be familiar with this charming turn of phrase. Its centrality to what I am about to write thus merits a bit of an introduction. A fellow name Joshua Ellis, who is credited with coining the phrase explains it thusly.

I think the problem is that the future, maybe for the first time since WWII, lies on the far side of an event horizon for us, because there are so many futures possible. There’s the wetware future, the hardware future, the transhumanist future, the post-rationalist (aka fundamentalist) future.

And then there’s the future where everything just sort of keeps going on the way it has, with incremental changes, and technology is no longer the deciding factor in things. You don’t need high tech to change the world; you need Semtex and guns that were designed by a Russian soldier fifty-odd years ago.

Meanwhile, most of the people with any genuine opportunity or ability to effect global change are too busy patting each other on the back at conventions and blue-skying goofy social networking tools that are essentially useless to 95% of the world’s population, who live within fifteen feet of everyone they’ve ever known and have no need to track their fuck buddies with GPS systems.

[...]

The upshot of all of this is that the Future gets divided; the cute, insulated future that Joi Ito and Cory Doctorow and you and I inhabit, and the grim meathook future that most of the world is facing, in which they watch their squats and under-developed fields get turned into a giant game of Counterstrike between crazy faith-ridden jihadist motherfuckers and crazy faith-ridden American redneck motherfuckers, each doing their best to turn the entire world into one type of fascist nightmare or another.

Of course, nobody really wants to talk about that future, because it’s depressing and not fun and doesn’t have Fischerspooner doing the soundtrack.

There are two things here that I take as definitive of the GMF:

1. “Everything just sort of keeps going the way it has.” That is to say, there isn’t going to be some radically game-changing discontinuity between our present horizon of expectations and how things will be down the road. This isn’t a particularly radical notion, but it’s an important prophylactic against various forms of millenarian thinking, of which techno-optimism and apocalypticism are the best examples. This is not to say that things aren’t going to change—they most certainly will and that’s the point of all this—but that change will take place in this world, not one we might imagine. The Grim Meathook Future is the future that comes unannounced, the one that is basically already here, if not yet recognized as such.
2. “The future gets divided; the cute, insulated future that…you and I inhabit, and the grim meathook future that most of the world is facing.” This is the more important of the two points. The Grim Meathook Future exists in a certain sort of opposition to a bright, shiny future that is reserved for what is ultimately a very small proportion of the world’s population. The interesting thing here, though, is the supposition that anyone reading the original post “inhabits” the cute future. This is true almost by definition. Writing and thinking about “issues” the way Ellis does—the way I am doing right now—is an indulgence of the Decadent, Detached future against which the Grim Meathook one is defined.

This other future—not the discontinous fanciful one, but the painfully immanent detached and decadent one—is closely related to what I intend by “hypegeist.” Like the GMF, it’s functionally already present, but is sufficiently unfamiliar, sufficiently unscrutinized to remain in something of subjective tense. Hypegeist is the emerging system of social reproduction, relevant to a small but significant minority of the world, that serves the critical function of helping one (everyone whose anyone) avoid confronting the disturbing and potentially frightening future that is descending on everyone else.

The Silicon Valley/BoingBoing version of this that Ellis alludes to is only one aspect of it. I mean to include a whole range of contexts that owe their existence to a closed circuit of self-reference. Information technology (the internet, basically, but also mobile phones, an evolved form of television and perhaps a few other things) plays an enormous role in this, but I don’t want to reduce it all to that, at least not quite yet. What I’m talking about developed along side these technologies and is not only influenced by them but is also an influence on how we use and understand them.

But why Hypegeist? Because of what happened to zeitgesit. The idea of a “spirit of the age” has come into a new sort of vogue that obliterates its meaning at the same time as the concept ascends to a new omnipresence in its total and obfuscating senselessness.

The best example of the transformation undergone by the specific term is probably Google Zeitgeist: “search patterns, trends, and surprises.” Like Digg but with more pretensions towards cultural insight, this “service” (?) alleges to tap into the soul of culture by charting what people are searching for. There are plenty of other examples of the use of the term zeitgeist to mean nothing more that “what’s going on at this website.” Sadly, this metric is becoming accepted by the marketing industry in a way that reinforces its tenuous claims to meaningfulness. Forbes:

If you visited the news site Digg.com on Tuesday afternoon, you likely spotted quirky news stories chosen by the site’s largely 18- to 24-year-old male audience, including “Woman Steals Man’s Genitals” and “Mother Gives Birth Then Flushes Twins Down Toilet.”

But an audience of search marketers examining Digg at a conference the same day saw something else: a goldmine of lucrative Web traffic.

“Social media” sites like Digg, Reddit.com and Newsvine.com let users submit and rank news headlines and other links to sites around the Web. Sites voted to the top of these news aggregators receive tens of thousands of visitors. But the online marketing professionals gathered at New York’s Search Marketing Expo this week were interested in tapping into a different feature of these sites: their growing power to affect Google and Yahoo!’s search results.

[...]

Chris Winfield, president of search marketing firm 10e20, enumerated some subjects that are sure to get approval from Digg’s largely libertarian and adolescent user base. Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul, the NBC show Heroes, and the iPhone, for instance, are favorites among Diggers. President Bush, Fox News and the Recording Industry Association of America, on the other hand, are hated topics that companies should avoid.

[...]

Blendtec’s “Will It Blend?” video series–in which a company representative puts a different household item into one of its blenders in every two-minute episode–has gained enormous popularity on sites like Digg. A clip devoted to blending an action figure of Chuck Norris was especially popular, Winfield pointed out. “Blendtec really grasps social media,” he said. “They know that Diggers love Chuck Norris and they love things being destroyed. “

There are two halves to this. First, information extraction (Ron Paul and Heroes: good, President Bush and the RIAA: bad); second, informed strategy (Chuck Norris + destruction = profit). But it’s a most wonderful circle: Ron Paul’s campaign was built on internet hype, even on hype about the internet hype. Heroes was (is?), however unsuccessfully, an attempt to replicate the popularity of Lost in no small part by engaging in similar “viral marketing” tactics. The iPhone’s release was a meticulously calculated effort to build hype around the “secret” product—it was finally revealed to an auditorium full of live bloggers whose sites all crashed because of frantic refreshing for the next breathlessly ungrammatical update. All of these things are significant mainly by virtue of their deliberate strategy to be so. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but the fetish of “buzz” creates an ever more insipid loop.

Yes, there is a lot of buzz about “buzz”, often under the dubious moniker of “social media.” Insisting that this is silly doesn’t make it untrue or mean that it doesn’t have very real consequences. Enthusiasm over Second Life among marketing types led to millions of dollars of basically pointless investments, almost entirely because they “had heard so much about it”. I’ll not take the time just now to map out how extensive or irrational this whole business is, but will get to the matter later.

The phenomenon extends beyond the purview of those paid to promote specific products and services. The term “hype cycle” is discussed by both Gartner and n+1 (Gartner first, though, coining an established technical term, which n+1 either cheerfully ignored or managed to be unaware of—but again, this is for another time). From corporate-catering research firms to “avant garde” literary journals, the theme pervades and doubles back on itself as a result. People can make themselves famous merely by demonstrating their ability to do so:

“[Julia Allison] used this medium and became unstoppable,” says Choire Sicha, former managing editor of Gawker. “She just made it happen in a way that seemed seamless and kind of magical.” [...] Self-promotion is no longer solely the domain of egotists and professional aspirants. Anyone can be a personal branding machine.

That’s from Wired. It’s the cover story (is two of these a trend?). Gawker, of course reports on this one too, further exacerbating the self-generating reality of self-generated selves.

In addition to what passes for “technology” these days and what (relatedly) passes for “culture”, this is a problem for what (relatedly) passes for “politics”:

It was not exactly Walter Cronkite declaring that the Vietnam War would end in stalemate. But the impact was apparent almost immediately, starting with The Drudge Report, the online news billboard that is the home page to many political reporters in Washington and news producers in New York. It had as its lead story a link to a YouTube clip of Mr. Russert’s comments, accompanied by a photograph of a beaming Mr. Obama with his wife, Michelle, and the headline, “The Nominee.”

The thought echoed throughout the world of instant political analysis, steamrolling the Clinton campaign’s attempts to promote the idea that her victory in Indiana was nonetheless an upset in the face of Mr. Obama’s heavy spending and his campaign’s predictions that he would win there, or that she could still come back if delegates in Florida and Michigan are seated.

As if The Times wanted to confirm beyond all doubt the ridiculous extent of the political-news media echo chamber. This is just a particularly outstanding example. The campaigns are consistently covered almost exclusively in terms of their relative failure or success, the viability of their strategic decisions, and what other outlets are saying about them. The MSNBC political blog First Read regularly refers to “the CW”—conventional wisdom—when reporting on the daily “political” “news.” Polls are taken about what voters think other voters think about non-issues.

“Technology“, “culture”, and “politics” have all become their own little universes that seems to function quite happily without much reference to anything really outside themselves—without really running up against events. For the sake organization (and so that I never write a post this long again) I’ll use these three admittedly loose and artificial categories to divide up discussion of this whole Hypegeist business.

For the sake of symmetry, I intend to divide the Grim Meathook Future and related matters into three parts as well. There’s science, economy, and war. For the sake brevity, I’ll save an explanation of those for later. What’s important to note now is that I don’t want to imply an opposition between Made Up Stuff From The Internet That Doesn’t Matter on the one hand, and Important World Events Happening In Real Life on the other. It’s not that all the hypegeisty stuff distracts us from the GMF-y stuff. On the contrary, the two are become ever more intertwined. This entanglement, the cross-pollenation of enthusiasm over networks and the collapsing of borders of both territory and identity, all of it makes things…complicated.

The reason the whole hypegeist business is problematic is that it thrives on these complications and interconnections in a way that can all to easily become self-referential and pointless. The solution is not to be dismissive or derisive of the things I have put in quotation marks. The solution is to always and at all times be concerned about those things that slip too easily from view and how it is that this can happen. That is to say, it is never OK not to worry about the Grim Meathook Future.

When asked that question, I realized that’s mainly what I’d been doing here already. So I finally moved the thing to WordPress and wrote this attempt at a manifesto. This’ll be followed by another, prompted by a different interlocutor.

A HuffPo blog entry from several days ago tries to keep everyone updated on the spirit of the times: “If you haven’t noticed—we’re living in the era of the hybrid.” A few examples follow, (incidentally all purchases that the author is considering): a new hybrid car, some new sort of dog called a Puggle (“Breeders call them mutts. But owners call them hybrids”), and a half off-road, half racing bicycle.

But also, Barack Obama.

New mixes. New cultural combinations. And with this new era of Hybrid Politics — an opportunity to see the word in a new way. Barack Obama is both genetically, socially, educationally, and politically a Hybrid.

As if to remove any doubt abot what’s going on here, the author proceeds to answer the post’s titular question, “Is Barack Obama a ‘Hybrid’?”

Lets take a look.

His father is Kenyan
His mother American (Wichita, Kansas)
Born in Honolulu, Hawaii.
At age six he moved to Jakarta

(the list continues…)

A previously useful term-turned-concept has now worked its way back around to its original, prosaic usage while retaining its now totally unjustified theory-esque cache. The result is this weird comment that actually treats Obama as a sort of biological specimen. This could have required a denouncement and/or rejection back before “hybrid” came to mean (and be) “fashionable”—when it was just a regular word that didn’t require midsentence capitalization. Why isn’t this just a sophisticated (elitist?) version of “Is Barack Obama a Halfbreed?”

The self evident answer is to refer to the new function of “hybrid” as a watchword for our cr-azy post-modern times. However, such an excessively literal application of the word’s figurative usage is suggests that the sentiment it reflects is an extremely shallow one. The consequence is a commitment to a notion of authentic hybridity that vitiates the insights that the term is supposed to help elucidate:

Obama has remained himself. He is well spoken, passionate, literate, and able to speak with his own voice. Compare this “Hybrid” Kenyan/American to Hillary Clinton’s southern drawl and you see the natural conflict between the Hybrid make of Obama and the attempt to impersonate roots that she simply can’t claim.

Aside from repeating the “clean and articulate” trope, this comparison introduces passion and authentic speech as the virtues of his partially sub-altern origins. Hillary, by contrast, is only faking the “white working class” thing.

This is incredibly pernicious. For politics to descend into a conflict over whose claim to their roots is more legitimate is a disaster. Not only does it contribute to the trend of utterly contentless media maneuvering that seems to dominate the national campaign, it materially impacts the outcome and policy discourse.

Hillary’s allegedly inauthentic main street charm seems to have served her well enough in Pennsylvania. At best, Obama’s appeal as a representative of new cultural combinations fell short. And for all its enthusiasm, the above hybridity hypothesis didn’t help either. Not that this particular post should be expected to. Rather, the impulse it channels is a dangerous one for Obama’s candidacy. Aren’t hybrid cars, designer dogs and the outdoors/athletic chic of special bicycles exactly the sort of “elitist” indulgences that supposedly alienate all those small town voters?

And more than those particular (expensive) commodities, the rhetoric around and ideology behind the hybrid label hardly seem the sort of thing that would dispel the charge that Obama is “out of touch with the mainstream.” The problem is not that celebrating all these new cultural forms isn’t an effective selling point (though it probably isn’t for anyone not already on board). The problem is that all this hopeful talk has eclipsed other, perhaps more substantive reasons to support him, putting online communities like the Huffington Post (and DailyKos and others) even more firmly in the role of preaching to the choir.

As for policy, look at trade. A more sophisticated discourse about Obama as a cosmopolitan candidate might expect him to be all for transnational flows and what have you. A superficial hybridity characterization based on his genetics can be content with the fact that he sticks to the democratic party line. More to the point, he has to in order to have even a fighting chance of cutting into Hillary’s base. In Ohio, Pennsylvania and now also Indiana (among some others) the campaigns have traded ads and mailers over who is more against trade. Because, you know, it gives all the jobs to the foreigners.

It’s not just a matter of economic self-interest though. It involves those “imagined communities”—which are first and foremost imagined economies. Collective sentiments about how production is supposed to be. The same fossilized market morality to which Michael Moore appeals when he rages against the collapse of the Flint Michigan manufacturing industry because of how it’s ruining that community. Objecting to trade seems to be a sort of political prerequisite to being part of, or “in touch with”, such a community. That leaves little room to disagree. To do so is already to be an outsider of whose motives one should be suspicious.

For continuity’s sake, I’ll point out the similarity to the situation written about in the other long post. Once again, there’s a sort of fluffy abstract world in which discussions take place and and decisions get made (or influenced). Delegates are frantically counted, recounted and debated when it doesn’t really matter and blogs blog about blogs blogging about hybridity. Meanwhile, there’s global famine. As Cowen and the cover story of The Economist argue, this might be due in part to failures of global trade. At the very least, the default anti-trade posture to which both democrats are pandering seems ill-advised at this point.

To be as blunt and alarmist as possible, doesn’t it bother anyone that the presidential candidates are fighting over who is furthest on the wrong side of keeping the world from starving? At a minimum, the topic will not get the discussion or even policy positioning it merits from the candidates because of the need to establish oneself as “fighting to keep jobs at home,” whether that really helps people anywhere or not. The imperative to achieve authenticity or connectedness pre-empts any possibility of changing the prevailing political winds on the issue.

Just because the paradigm for Obama’s authentic nature is different doesn’t make it any less distorting. Cheering on the age of the hybrid and Obama as its mascot is probably ultimately harmless, if a bit frivolous. But the attitude it betrays is one that has consequences for how politics is happening. Not just the “bittergate” kind, potentially the “how do we feed the people?” kind too.

Another paired set: eco-terrorism near Seattle and potential anti-military terrorism in Times Square. Both happened in the past few days. In the Seattle suburbs, five new houses were burnt down and the Earth Liberation Front left a banner. In New York, someone tossed a pretty little bomb (that police have apparently called an IED) into the military recruiting station that sits in the middle of Times Square.

Both of these may be cases of “domestic terrorism,” something difficult for some to conceive:

The small bomb that went off in Times Square early this morning “doesn’t appear to be” a terrorist act, said White House press secretary Dana Perino…When asked whether a bomb is, by definition, an act of terror, Mrs. Perino paused. “It’s a little bit to early to determine what happened,” Mrs. Perino said. “I’m going to let the authorities do their investigation and then we’ll get back to you.

It’s not unreasonable to think that “not terrorism” was intended as “not The Terrorists.” It wasn’t Al-Qaeda or whatever, just some dude on a bike. The point is that red-blooded Americans might be destroying stuff to make political statements. It’s not radically new or anything, but it could have some significance, as demonstrated by this slip where an official seemed unable to apply the term terrorist to an American. For all the talk of it being all non-nation state-y and deterritorialized, the war on terror still has been maintained with a healthy concept of inside/outside. Even when suspected terrorist are hunted down in the U.S., they’re invading foreign agents (or, in the case of John Walker Linde, one of us who went over there–and, if you didn’t know, it seems that was a transgression deserving of pretty special reprimand).

How often would minor acts of political inflected destruction like this have to happen for them not to be immediately forgotten? Not the militia movements or the Branch Davidians, not the fabled one person army, just some property-damaging protest against objectionable aspects of the present.

These recent events aren’t a reason for optimism in this area. The two targets are a little, well, obvious. Suburban sprawl and military recruitment? Really? The choices feel somewhat adolescent: the big new houses and Uncle Sam are mostly symbolic here. The Seattle arson might inflict some financial cost, but they’ll rebuild the houses. The minor explosion in New York did little more than break some glass and get attention–basically little more than a prank.

It might come down to a suspicion that the people responsible for these acts were acting out of psychological rather than material interests (more on this later). By way of counter-example, here’s a pretty good little story from the Global Guerilla’s blog (which it seems this blog is basically a rip off of now).

I’m not advocating violence here, but we all know where history is headed.

The concurrence of two seemingly unrelated events has finally shaken me out of my several year “planning phase” and prompted me to actually write a blog post. Event, the first: Last Wednesday the internet went out for a couple tens of millions of people on the other side of the world. The situation has only gotten worse. Something happened to some pretty important cables in the Mediterranean and left people from Dubai to Bangladesh vying for little remaining bandwidth or scrambling to reroute access through satellite systems. Initial reports blamed a boat trying to moor off the coast of Egypt in bad weather for severing two oceanic cable systems on January 30th. That explanation looked good for the cut that happened off the coast of Egypt near Alexandria, but not for the cut that happened within a few hours, but hundreds of miles away near Marseille, France. No one seems to have even bothered to try to explain the third major data artery to go dead. It did so two days later, due to some sort of damage off the coast of Dubai in the Persian Gulf.

Now, two days after that, another one. Qatar is now offline as a result of damage to a conduit from that country to the UAE. Also late-breaking: Egypt checked, there was no boat near the original incident site.

So, four major linkages in the global data network have gone down in and around the Middle East over the last five days for seemingly unrelated reasons, none of which have been explained.

Event, the second: Yacrosoft!

It doesn’t bear repeating. Microsoft made a bid for Yahoo!. The internet went, predictably, nuts. Every news outlet reported it and every blog speculated about what might result from it.

Google responded to the news with a strongly worded condemnation of the potential acquisition and the Times is reporting that Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt phoned Yahoo’s CEO Jerry Yang “offering the company’s help in fending off Microsoft, possibly in the form of a partnership between the companies.”

Google’s interest in the situation is obvious—the deal would merge the distant second and third place players in the search arena into one potentially realistic challenger for the thrown Google practically invented for itself. However, the response from the Googleplex cannot be reduced to, or dismissed as, merely corporate self-interest. They’ve got some good points:

The openness of the Internet is what made Google—and Yahoo!—possible. A good idea that users find useful spreads quickly. Businesses can be created around the idea. Users benefit from constant innovation. It’s what makes the Internet such an exciting place.

So Microsoft’s hostile bid for Yahoo! raises troubling questions. This is about more than simply a financial transaction, one company taking over another. It’s about preserving the underlying principles of the Internet: openness and innovation.

Could Microsoft now attempt to exert the same sort of inappropriate and illegal influence over the Internet that it did with the PC? While the Internet rewards competitive innovation, Microsoft has frequently sought to establish proprietary monopolies—and then leverage its dominance into new, adjacent markets.

The sentiment behind this statement is powerful and emphatically true. Especially the part about the internet being such an exciting place and especially the part about how that excitement is made possible by the ready and effective dissemination of information.

That system is down at the moment. This corporate affair that is clogging the first world’s bandwidth with an unbelievable amount of chatter regards an internet that has four deep, mysterious cuts in it right now.

I have an RSS ticker add-on installed so that there is a constant stream of new information scrolling across the top of my Firefox window. I have it connected to my del.icio.us subscriptions and network. I subscribe to tags like “web” and “internet” among several others ranging across disparate subject areas. Never has a single news item so clogged my personal data stream. There’s just an endless flood of articles about the Yacrosoft! bid. Many of my favorite blogs have multiple, lengthy posts about its various implications for the future of the web. The fact that the web is inexplicably disintegrating in the Orient is literally getting drowned out by all the excitement over this Silicon Valley love triangle.

That’s not how it’s supposed to work. When a big part of the world gets cut off from the network, everyone is supposed to feel it—because everyone is cut off.If they can’t communicate with us, we can’t communicate with them. Although Yahoo!, Google, Microsoft and a handful of others might make it seem otherwise, there is no center of the internet from which to be cut off. At least, there’s not supposed to be.

The news stories I have seen about this major loss of connectivity note that it’s a demonstration of how fragile the internet is. They’re right, but for the completely wrong reason. Of course it breaks if the wires get cut. It’s not magic. (We still all understand that, don’t we? That it’s made out of stuff? Right?) That’s not shocking nor should it be worrying.

What is worrying but unfortunately not shocking is that when millions and millions of people “over there” get “disconnected,” the developed world, at least the United States, is not all that affected. They are cut off from us—not we from them.

Are there millions of people who don’t even know about Google’s response to Microsoft’s bid to buy Yahoo! because the wires connecting their countries to the ones where major international news outlets have their servers are, for some reason, broken? It’s unclear at this time. Reporting on the consequences of the disconnection is a little sketchy, possibly as a result of it.

If this can happen and be of so little consequence then the world is a very long way away from the type of global super interconnectivity that the companies currently making the headlines are supposed to be facilitating. The decentralized, non-hierarchical, evolving, dynamic internet in which I like to believe, and to which Google is appealing against the evil of Microsoft, seems at the moment much more fancy than fact. Patching the physically damaged network won’t change its underlying asymmetry.

But, for now, let’s just hope that it stops coming apart at the seams.