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indefinable, opposite of loneliness.”207 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.”208
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.” 209

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

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