Outrage Machine by Tobias Rose-Stockwell

Author:Tobias Rose-Stockwell [ROSE-STOCKWELL, TOBIAS]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2023-07-12T00:00:00+00:00

PART III

History of the Machine

Chapter 16

The Ancient History of Virality

Our species has been around for a long time.

For most of human history, knowledge would just dissolve. Terrible atrocities, wars, massacres. Incredible heroism and profound triumph over struggle. Whole languages, cultures, and peoples could be subsumed by another. All was forgotten.

This knowledge would not stick, because there was no medium upon which to attach it. Names, faces, events, could be retold as oral histories, but they would not remain for long. Only some would transit forward in time for a handful of generations before they, too, were absorbed into myth, or lost forever.

Until we could write, we could not record. Until we could print, we could not compare.

Understanding the history of our species is like looking backward into a picture frame that holds tiny scraps of a long-faded image. We can make out the rough outline of human forms. We cannot see faces, distinct features. The image has dissolved, and we must infer and apply our own interpretations to their lives and struggles.

But what we do know is that across all cultures, everywhere on earth, humans have a desire to learn and share news. Our ancestors lived in an information-poor world, and had few ways of exposing themselves to new knowledge. Because of this, our brains might have evolved to crave novel information in much the same way we crave sugar. Both were helpful for our survival, and both were rare in nature.

For much of our past, up-to-date knowledge was also a matter of life and death. It helped us understand where danger was, whom to trust, and what to avoid. The news was a ritual of exchange, not just a commodity to consume. The origin of the word news is quite literal: It’s the plural of the “new” thing(s) people know about and pass along.1

The ancient world was smaller not just in terms of populace, with a global population a tiny fraction of what it would become in the Industrial Era (most of the largest cities on earth had far less than one hundred thousand people), it was also smaller in terms of perspective.2 Most of the world was basically invisible—a vision incomplete and fleeting. Life was slow, cyclical, tedious, and local. Any news was a glimpse of the unknown.

In rural areas, when a traveler carrying news arrived, it might be the most significant informational event of the year. A piece of written parchment or a letter, read aloud in public, was a new window into a foreign world, an alternate reality. News of major events traveled shockingly slowly. Like light emitted from a far-off star, the view of an occurrence was only known long after it occurred.

The story of civilization is the story of slowly evolving news networks. Each network was painstakingly built and improved over centuries, influenced by every fledgling technology that improved the transit of knowledge.

This knowledge was about power. The faster and farther news could spread through these networks, the easier it was for rulers to rule.

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