The Trivial Nexus

On information overload, the internet revolution, and chimpanzees with loaded mags

Three, six and nine. Three numbers, according to, the greatest engineer that has graced the planet: Nikola Tesla. He says these are the keys to understanding the entire universe.

Do not mind me poking him, for he is utterly wrong here. I am absolutely absolved of all the 'crimes' that ensue here, for two reasons:

1. The perpetually amiable, often bitterly banter between engineers and physicists. Reminiscent of the like poles of magnets — starkly similar yet striving to push away. Closer to the 'enemy,' hand in hand naked. viz., chemists, biologists — yikes! You smelly (for obvious reasons) nerds.
2. Notoriously famous for being egoistic, self-absorbed, and dismissive of other bodies of work as trivial, us physicists Writing this with only a bachelor's degree. Allow it, jeez! All preachy today, huh? do not like being lectured by the king of the community where cutting costs at every turn is valued.

The number that holds the key to the universe would rather be two. Take a 360 degree look around you, the bottle is either open or closed, the switch is either on or off, the clock is either working or dead.

The man next door is either good or bad.

If you peek a look at the internet and ask Google about the most influential ideas of all time, you are likely to be greeted by Newtonian physics, Darwinian theory of evolution, the World Wide Web, et al. Rather sadly, there can only be one correct answer; the Occam's Razor. Evolutionarily, the human brain has become capable of recognizing patterns and similarities. One is ideal, binary is good enough, anything else tends to give us annoyance. Similarly, the easiest explanation is the best. Who likes headaches solving partial differential equations and sketching the molecular structures of atorvastatin when one can instead be fantasizing about earth being the center of the universe, turmeric curing diabetes and alchemy making us Mansa Musa rich.

In the Socratic dialogue Republic, Plato famously wrote: "our need will be the real creator." And oh, dear boy, have we created! And what have we created (and discovered)! The heliocentric theory, The International Space Station, the transistor, penicillin, the internal combustion engine, the anti-matter the GPS, butter chicken, Only Fans, Galaxy Note 7, Fat boy, Windows 8. Some of them, though deserving of the Nobel Prize accolade, were met with imprisonment, abandonment and stoning and some that deserved capital punishment were, on the contrary, rewarded by government bailouts.

Where is ISIS when you need it?

The Indian internet revolution commenced with its then richest man began offering four free gigs of daily mobile data to everyone who bought his newly launched telecom service's sim card — Jio. For a nation crammed with a gigantic population, the majority of whom can barely make ends meet — affording data for merely catching-up to the rest of the world soaring to new heights with the internet was out of sight let alone relishing YouTube videos.

Suddenly, a huge chunk of the population had seemingly limitless access to the world of the WWW. In true sense of the word, the internet revolution could not have been possible without 17.7% of the global population aboard. And there we were. Everywhere.

From Facebook messenger asking for bobs and vagene pics to YouTube explaining The Theory of General Relativity to a global audience, including that of Harvard what their subject pioneers could not.

I have for long been suffering from generalized anxiety disorder. It often does not let me focus on the work at hand — leads my attention astray. For anybody who has hustled their way into the self-improvement bandwagon knows all about dopamine and its, in rough medical/psychological terms, detox. I tried it — totally abstained from watching all crass, easy to digest, senseless entertainment and rather focused on consuming at least infotainment if not hard-core information. Initially it did seem to work. I felt light, the dopamine releasing into my blood stream every fifteen seconds would definitely have gone up by several minutes given I focused on watching longer video formats.

Industrious — that is the exact word I would give to that feeling. Ask my friends or family, I have always had a knack for being a living storeroom for random facts, seldom turning out to be useful. Knowing why a whopping ninety-four percent of the Chinese population lives east was enlightening. More so was discovering how the Big-Bang Theory is the defining knowledge of why and how the universe came into existence. How very productive had I become. Solving permutations and combinations while studying. Partaking Kip Thorne, Barry Barish and Rainer Weiss by posting 'fiery' Instagram stories of their research, telling everybody who doubted the theory just about how wrong they were.

This euphoria did not last long, though. A new obstruction had surfaced, that of information overload. Nothing new per se, however neither is syphilis — both begin by becoming addicted to harmless, routine human endeavors but travelling a little too far and deep might end up wrecking your brains. I am genuinely impressed by the audacity of comparing information overload to syphilis. But here we are.

"Everything should be made as simple as possible but not one bit simpler." Albert Einstein

A very serious question for me was, and still is regarding this massive dilemma and disconnect between the two major platforms for knowledge: the traditional — classroom, chalk-board, with hardcopies of books version. And the digital — lavish, smooth between transitions of web-pages, responsive. Something you can repeat as many times you want, learn at your pace.

To the majority, the question might be a rather stupid one or to be more precise, an idea based in idealism — that does not reflect reality and come to terms with it, the one that strives to flaws in everything. The liberandu A portmanteau between the words liberal and a play on the Hindi word for a whore. approach.

Having already made my feelings very clear about having no doubts on the limits of human ingenuity — the solution(s?) to this dilemma was eventually plucked out, obviously. Just that the effects that the world has observed — at least the observant ones — have been nothing short of calamitous, in most cases.

Humanity just does not seem to catch a break. Most of its inventions come out of a deep, drunk and divine thought, with an innate desire to be philanthropic, helpful to one another's needs. Despite this fact, in the end we always tend to fuck things up. Just look at the faultless Chinese feeding each other an exotic delicacy in the form of a bat.

Wherever you go wandering into the vast blacks (white if you do not use the dark mode) of YouTube, at least half of it is jam-packed with awareness of global issues. And we still have all this misinformation floating around?

Climate change a hoax? A man that has never picked up a molecular-physics textbook to understand the process by which carbon dioxide absorbs energy at a variety of wavelengths between 2,000 and 15,000 nanometers — a range that overlaps with that of infrared energy, soaks up this infrared energy, it vibrates and re-emits the infrared energy back in all directions appears before you on a 15.6″ OLED screen having learnt the Adobe creative cloud suite to lecture you on the benefits of global warming to the air conditioning industry all while dismantling decades of established research?

Do not get me wrong, it is not always mandatory to go neck deep into the nuances of every major subject on the planet to make mostly informed choices. I do not necessarily need to understand the concept of pharmacokinetics of acetaminophen to know that in most cases, it will reduce the body temperature of a human who is suffering from the flu. But to extend this knowledge to comment as far as it works in subduing the Covid-19 illness just because both ailments share a major symptom — that of a fever, let alone what the drug can do to anybody suffering from a serious underlying condition masquerading as a mere fever.

And this is exactly the kind of havoc online, unregulated education culture is wreaking on susceptible to misinformation, gullible people.

Human attention span is on a free-fall leading to reduced relevancy of textbooks and ever-growing need to replace them with entertaining, pleasing and aesthetically comforting VFX and CGI video fests.

Tell me about how water is wet. Garner thirty-two million views. Six months later, write-up a pretentious philosophical sodden trash of a script telling me how water might not be wet but a creation of my own mind according to the latest mindfuck thought experiment you had last night which kept you up past five in the morning.

To blabber meandering, pedestrian jargon with a visual masterpiece laden with rounded corners, intuitive UI, attractive colors is enough as long as you have our attention (or pretension?). Inject that revelatory fact every seven minutes of patter to release that dopamine — slowly but surely.

What do we do? Turn back to Neanderthals? Should we not adapt to and make the most use of the emerging technologies and facilities to avail? Shall we still submerge ourselves in trivial forms of learning. Am I asking you to stay conservative when for most of the rest I demand of you to turn modern?

To answer, I only have a few words to quote:

"In the age of information, ignorance is a choice." Unknown, Multiple Sources

Humans cannot be faulted, at least completely for being tribal, violent, gullible and illiterate — we are not accountable for what we become, not any more than the earthquake that strikes Japan with an intensity of 9.1 on the Richter scale for what can it do about the laws of physics? Likewise, for us, our exploits are a concoction of neurochemistry, psychology, biology, physics and our environment that encompasses all our upbringing, sociology, economics and relationships. Neither can we be trusted with too much, for we are privy to exuberant exhibition as so much we forget to solidify the insides.

We used to be chimpanzees. Now we are chimpanzees with loaded mags and guns. The sort of those I just pretended to be in the initials of this blog post dissing Tesla. Just enough to protect ourselves. With more than necessary to inflict harm to ourselves.

"Nothing worth having comes easy." Theodore Roosevelt