The Network, the River, and How to Think About Time in the 21st Century
The original (Spanish) version of this post can be found here.
About a year ago, I wrote a thread on Twitter that went viral within minutes.This article is the second in a small collection where I’m sharing some background ideas that underpinned that thread. I believe they’re useful not only for understanding the world, but also for navigating life.
This second piece explores how our conception of time has changed.
Software, in its first version, always tries to imitate hardware. That’s why, in the early version of the Internet, websites were static sites that didn’t change and merely connected to each other. The hardware was a network of computers, and the Internet was the software imitating that network: a bunch of nearly immutable digital artifacts that you could access—nothing more.
But “it’s not accurate to think of networks as systems made up of computers. Rather, they connect people, using computers as mediators. The great success of the Internet isn’t technical, but rather its human impact.”1
If we think of the Internet as a massive connector of people, the reason it has changed our sense of time becomes self-evident: people are not static objects. What the Internet connects isn’t a collection of unchanging realities, like static websites—it connects people. And people are biographies, evolving beings who think, who build a narrative as they grow, and who hold within them a flow of consciousness: ideas, thoughts, inventions, songs, emotions. What the Internet has done, essentially, is to bring together the stream of consciousness of every person on the planet. No wonder we’re overwhelmed.
So the Internet isn’t a network in the way we usually imagine it. It isn’t a fixed physical object (that was the first conception of software, trying to imitate hardware). The Internet is an enormous river—a monumental current formed by the accumulated flow of billions of individual consciousnesses. It has only just begun to flow, and it will keep flowing as long as our species exists.
And here’s the thing: until very recently, we were used to being alone with a tiny trickle of consciousness—maybe that of our parents, our partners, and our own. We had time to observe everything immutable around us. Today, we are fully immersed in this immense river of collective consciousness. That’s why we feel like everything is changing faster. But that’s not quite true—we’re simply perceiving it differently. What stays the same no longer catches our attention because we already know it. But all those life stories, all that new information coming from the stream of other people’s consciousnesses—they pull us in irresistibly. It’s as if our brains have been flooded.
Sotto voce, this transformation is changing the world. We can see it in social media, which has shifted from being a repository of information to a collection of ephemeral stories that flow and disappear, like a river.
The same is happening in the economy. Investors and business analysts stopped caring long ago about a company’s static snapshot (its income statement or balance sheet). Instead, they care about cash flow, which has become the new god of finance.
The best player in this new game—whether you like him or not (I don’t)—is Elon Musk. He understood long ago that it doesn’t matter whether your company will hit projections 20 years from now. What matters is whether it’s holding attention today, right now, in the middle of the stream of consciousness. To do that, you can claim you're about to revolutionize the auto industry, build a tunnel network for high-speed cars, colonize other planets, buy one of the world’s most important social networks, or challenge another Internet mogul to a cage match—it doesn’t matter. The goal is to stay in the center of attention because some of those watching you today have the ability to keep investing in your companies. And that—today’s cash, not tomorrow’s business—is what really matters.
Pedro Sánchez—like Pablo Iglesias, Íñigo Errejón, and many other politicians around the world—has understood the same. People no longer have the time or attention span to reflect on what happened in the past. What matters is people's attention now, and the intimate bond that forms when, by capturing that attention, you become part of their stream of consciousness. This is what we referred to in the thread as “having possession of the ball.”
Before you dive into pessimism (I can see it coming), let me say that I don’t think today’s world is worse than the one before. Nostalgia, besides being largely useless, is deceptive. It’s entirely possible that this leap in human consciousness that we’ve had the privilege to experience firsthand is a turning point for our species—a paradigm shift that could make us infinitely more brilliant—and thus more kind—than we once were.
But in the meantime, understanding is also a way to find peace. And for that, I think this metaphor of reality as a river might help.
Photo by Anne Nygård on Unsplash
This quote from David Clark, one of the pioneers of the Internet, is part of the network’s pre-history—from the early days of something called “Arpanet,” which you can learn about at this link.