I should have read Tim Wu’s The Master Switch thirteen years ago. If I had, I would be less puzzled about the strange dance that has ensued this century involving mass media, the telecom industry, movie studios, and internet tech behemoths. I felt the same way about reading Spillover after COVID-19 hit. We should not have been surprised, but we ignored the signs of increasing zoonotic activity.
Wu keeps the reader engaged by weaving stories of empire-building titans while describing technological innovations in the field of distance (followed) by mass communication. He gives inventors their due credit, but the narratives focus on single-minded individuals with the financing and clout to monopolize an industry. The book begins with Alexander Bell of telephony fame, but the main players that contribute to the “rise and fall of information empires” (the subtitle of The Master Switch) are folks like Theodore Vail, David Sarnoff, and Ed Withacre. I had heard of Sarnoff, and about the breakup of AT&T/Bell in 1984. But as told by Wu, the story has twists and turns with an eye towards the long game. Government gets involved both in regulation and deregulation, but it’s not always clear when that’s a good thing.
Today’s post is about two things. The first is Wu’s very short chapter 15 titled “Esperanto for Machines”. Only seven pages long, several things jumped out at me. Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn, in creating TCP/IP, were simply trying to come up with an ad hoc fix to get three networks to talk to each other. They were constrained by the fact that “the wires were owned by AT&T and computing was a patchwork of fiefdoms centered on the gigantic mainframe computers, each with idiosyncratic protocols and systems.” By creating a “standard for the size and flow rate of data packets… [they] allow the Internet to run on any infrastructure, and carry any application, its packets traveling any type of wire or radio broadcast band… independent of the physical infrastructure.”
Wu emphasizes the tension between centralized and decentralized systems, making an analogy between the founding of the internet and the U.S. “The Founding Fathers had no choice but to deal with the fact of individual states already too powerful and mature to give up most of their authority to a central [federal] government.” Central planning realizes a number of efficiencies and can be less wasteful than competition. But because no central planner has perfect information, not to mention all the biases and groupthink that emerge in such systems, there isn’t one best way of doing things and hegemonic approaches stifle and stunt growth and adaptation in the long run. The result is death. Slow and maybe by a million cuts, but death nevertheless.
To navigate that tension, Wu quotes a dictum by Jon Postel regarding TCP/IP: “Be conservative in what you do. Be liberal in what you accept from others.” This is giving me much to chew on, and brings me to the second part of my post. It made me stop and think about the systems I’m embedded in (my department, my university, my chosen profession) and about the systems I research (proto-metabolism at the chemical origins of life). So let me digress briefly on these things.
Am I conservative in what I do as a professor? Largely so. They don’t call it the ivory tower for nothing. As a teacher and a researcher, I do try new things on a regular basis, but I do these incrementally – and I’ve found myself sometimes returning to early tried-and-true strategies, appropriately tweaked with the benefit of hindsight. As to my department, our curriculum is very conservative. We’ve made changes over the years, but in my opinion these have been sustaining innovations rather than disruptive innovations, and they were borne mostly out of necessity. Am I liberal in what I accept from others? I don’t know how to answer this. I do believe that there are many ways to teach students effectively and that there’s no “best” pedagogy or curriculum. I think educators should teach to their strengths and I think I’m an oddball among my colleagues. No one bothers me and I don’t bother them. As an individual professor I strongly defend being able to teach in my idiosyncratic fashion, but having served as an administrator in several capacities, I also understand the desire for some level of standardization and how that helps mitigate certain systemic issues that would otherwise crop up.
Research-wise, I’m primarily trained in electronic structure theory, although I have some experience in other areas of computational chemistry and I can converse on a wide range of subjects because I did my PhD in a large research group with diverse interests and employing a slew of different computational methods. My bread-and-butter is still electronic structure theory and my research students today do similar things as they did two decades ago (albeit on larger and more interesting systems). All this seems rather conservative on my part. While my research students are primarily chemistry or biochemistry majors, I’ve happily (or is it liberally?) accepted students from other departments: math, computer science, biology. But I don’t think this captures Postel’s dictum.
Then I got to thinking about the origin of life. Prebiotic chemistry is messy. It perhaps starts out decentralized with a slew of intermediates and products. But once the first (albeit primitive) autocatalytic cycles kick in, certain molecules will be selected over others to be amplified. Competition ensues and the losers die out, either being “eaten” as food or decomposed into yet other molecules. But this centralized ascendant protometabolic systems that incorporate food and dissipate waste molecules, alter their environment. This provides the opportunity for other liberal protometabolic systems to take advantage. One’s waste becomes another’s food, and competition comes again to the fore. Rinse. Repeat. The cycle of decentralization and centralization that Wu describes of information empires seems to apply well to both life and proto-life. As a multicellular organism, I might be an example of a highly centralized system that’s currently ascendant. But remember what happened to the dinosaurs. Meanwhile bacteria, perhaps representing decentralization, are still here and regularly trying to cannibalize us. And what is life, if not an organism that stores and utilizes information that also relies on communication to survive or thrive?
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