Where, exactly, does the present-day spate of crackpot ideas come from? I claim that social media has fundamentally rewired how how the “Global Brain” thinks. I claim it is due to a phase transition, in the sense of statistical mechanics. I replied in an email:
Well, given that this is the Lifeboat mailing list, I will attempt to frame this as yet another existential threat. With lots of hand–wringing. We approach a nexus of social media recommendation algorithms, financial flows driven by advertising, powerful but corrupt figures pushing hallucinatory propaganda, disinformation; I am a bit concerned that we are going civilizationally insane. The “Global Brain” is much smarter now than it was even decades ago, but is also increasingly delusional. This guy, Nassim Haramein, is yet another symptom.
What’s different now, vs. what was common 30-40-50 years ago? When I was a kid, someone got a book about the giant caverns underneath Lake Michigan and the dinosaurs that lived there. We passed it around as a hoot, and marveled at the illustrations. A friend of my parents had a shelf–full of books on UFO’s. Up in Evanston, there was a cafe–bookshop that served whole–grain vegan meals, smelled of incense, and sold healing crystals. And books about the dinosaurs that lived in caves under Lake Michigan. Crackpot beliefs are not new. But something has changed.
Let’s take a long view. Before social media and recommendation algorithms, we had “mass media”: TV, radio. The communications model was “hub and spoke”: a TV in the center, and “spokes” to millions of (passive) viewers. Some 2% of the population was involved with media production in some way: writers, actors, announcers, reporters, station owners. The nonsense was mostly filtered out, because (a) writers and reporters and station owners mostly weren’t crazy, and (b) incoherent drivel got poor ratings.
That all changed with the internet (and social media): The hub–n–spoke model is replaced by the many–to–many connection model. I really need some drawings and pictures here. The shape of the network changes. In physics, this is called a “phase transition”. There’s a famous example from fracking in the petroleum industry. Natural gas. If you have “tight rock” (shale) with gas in it, that gas doesn’t flow, because there are no pores, no holes, no openings through which that gas can flow. But if you break that rock, fracture it, the gas can now flow through the cracks.
Well, duh. Here’s the mathematical model: take a sheet of paper, draw some random dots on it. Now start connecting dots. Draw a random line. Then another, then another. When you’ve drawn just enough lines, then a path appears from the left to the right edge of the paper. The path appears only when you’ve drawn enough lines. This is called the “critical phase transition”; mathematicians have computed that it happens when you’ve drawn 0.44… of the lines. (I forget the exact digits) Draw less, nothing flows. Draw more, and maybe the flow improves a bit, but the critical transition is between “off” and “on”. Shit starts happening at a certain point.
This model got studied a lot in the 1980’s and 1990’s, because it models lots of other networks: the flow of electricity through power distribution grids, the blowing of fuses in a grid. The electrical breakdown of air in lightning. The propagation of cracks in steel boat hulls. The propagation of cracks in breaking ceramic. It was a generic model for what happens when the number of edges connecting the dots in a network changes. When the wiring diagram changes. Replace the dots by human minds, and it’s clear that the hub–n–spoke model of TV–radio–newspapers–books has been replaced by a wildly different network of social media. And what has happened? Like natural gas through fractured rock, crazy ideas flow freely in the new network.
In the 1970’s, there was one conference every two years that covered theories of Flat Earth. How do we know? Well, they actually published conference proceedings: maybe a dozen or two papers explaining how the Earth is flat, and what it means. And they’d print maybe 1000 copies, and you could buy it at the hippy–trippy cafe–bookshops, next to the incense. (I didn’t get that one, I got the one on UFO’s. For my crank–lit collection.)
In the 2010’s, there were one or two conferences a year, in each of the 50 states in the US. So, hundreds of these conferences. Every year. Rent a ballroom at a cheap hotel, print some posters, sell tickets and you’re good. What changed? Social media. Ideas spread directly from brain to brain. They by–pass the filtering of printed books and broadcast TV. In the past, your crazy uncle with his insane ideas about telephone wires had an audience that reached no further than the Thanksgiving dinner table. Now, crazy uncle has a youtube channel, 50K subscribers, and a silver youtube plaque hanging on his walls. A devoted fanbase that can explain how your soul flows downhill across telephone wires. Quantum is like grease that makes the wires slipperier when gravity pulls on your soul from the other end.
This is what we’ve got. Throw in money, algos, and propaganda, and it’s a bit more confused. There’s a bright side to all of this. I, for one, have been able to learn far, far, far more about obscure topics, than I ever could have, when my “search engine” was a library card catalog. We now have millions of nerds debating philosophy, military strategy, medicine and martial arts at a level of involvement that was impossible in the 1970’s and 1980’s. In this way, we are perhaps the smartest generation ever, with access to stunningly vast reserves of knowledge, and the free leisure time to think about it and debate it.
That’s the good news. The bad news is that lots of this info is polluted, and we don’t know how to deal with the pollution. The “mind virus” is a real thing. But we are pre–John Snow, who in 1854 figured out the germ theory for a Cholera outbreak in London, and got a poisoned water well padlocked to fix it. We don’t know how to do this. The algos on youtube spread crank physics with far greater ease than legit knowledge (because, well, actually, see .. physics is **hard** …) So we, as participants in the Global Brain, are kind of drunk or intoxicated, because we do not know how to deal with it. Free speech and all that. If this was limited to crank physics, I’d say, “who cares”. Want to pretend that sci–fi is real? OK. Life is short, enjoy yourself.
But it’s not limited to crank physics; we elected a TV game show host as President of the US, and watch a daily drama of Soviet–style dysfunction emanating from the White House clown show, It’s no accident that Fox News sounds exactly like Pravda or Izvestiya of old. MAGA has achieved what Marx and Lenin could not: the total brainwashing of nearly half the population. The mind–virus is real, and thanks to the fundamental change, the phase–transition in the mind–to–mind wiring network, it has a grip on the population far stronger than what we’ve seen in earlier eras. This phase transition is *why* we are so much more delirious than ever before.
Personally, it feels like this could all end very well, or all very badly. Exactly which, I cannot tell. Collective insanity is not a good thing. It wasn’t good, when Mao was doing the Cultural Revolution in China, and it’s not a good thing when MAGA is trying to recreate the Taliban in the USA. This is personal. My cousin told my sister that she fought for the wrong side in WWII. She should have fought for the Nazis, not against them. My sister was born decades after WWII ended. My cousin is lonely and watches Fox News all day long. The electric–guitar–playing hippy flower–child has morphed into a banal monster. “Why can’t we all get along?” he says, quoting not John Lennon, but Elon Musk. Call him senile, and say it’s an onset of dementia, but this is nation–wide. We’ve got civilizational–scale psychosis, and this… well, I don’t like it.
Postscript / Footnote
The above was a reply to an email on the Lifeboat Foundation mailing list. This list is very quiet, nearly inactive. But something interesting showed up recently. It was from Victor Vahidi Motti, on Fri, Apr 17, 11:47 AM. He wrote:
Quantum vacuum fluctuations are real—but extracting usable energy from them is not currently possible, and most claims (including Nassim Haramein’s) are not accepted by mainstream physics.
Let’s separate the science from the hype, read more here:
https://altplanetaryfuturesinst.blogspot.com/2026/04/is-vacuum-energy-next-energy-paradigm.html
This provided an opportunity for me to talk again, about an old idea of mine (from before 2017; I recall trying to explain it to my sister, on the way home from my Uncle’s funeral.) I’ve surely blogged about this before, either here, or on the OpenCog blog. Or maybe on twitter. Or discord. I’ve excitedly explained this to many people, and am met by incomprehension. But I soldier on, anyway.
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