The Rise of the Information Nexus

We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.
-Marshall McLuhan

The march of science and technology does not imply growing intellectual complexity in the lives of most people. It often means the opposite.
-Thomas Sowell

Just as crucial as food and water, human beings consume and share information to survive. This is a seemingly obvious claim in our current, eponymous age. But our yearning and need for information extends back to our primordial ancestors: it is embedded in how we perceive and process our place in reality. Gathering information is so pivotal to human existence that the body rewards this behavior with a dopamine hit. Put simply, we seek information because it feels good, and it feels good because it helps us navigate our lives. Information helped our ancestors find sustenance, avoid predators, build upon the experiences of ancestors, create tools. Over time, its role became much more metaphysical, evolving into the mechanism by which we make meaning of who we are and why we matter.

In the Information Age, our consumption of information is usually figured as a solitary, even lonely exercise. In general, I try to push back against this monolithic narrative. I read novels and newsletters, zip through podcasts at double speed, and write a blog not to hoard information for myself, but to participate in a sharing of information—both with those that matter to me and to the stranger that might find this information helpful. When a community reads a common journal or text, it creates meaning and purpose; it builds trust and affinity between fellow readers, fellow learners. It resembles a call option on continued cooperation: an exercise in the collective, reciprocal behavior meant to ensure future survival.

This said, the extreme proliferation and reorganization of information in the last thirty years has undeniably changed the way humans relate to information and interact with one another societally, culturally, and linguistically. Ironically, despite information’s increase in quantity and (sometimes) quality, our capacity to perceive and process it is astonishingly limited. Per John M. Coates’ The Hour Between Dog and Wolf:

[O]f this massive flow of information no more than about 40 bits per second actually reaches consciousness. We are, in other words, conscious of only a trivial slice of all the information coming into the brain for processing.

As with attention span, so too with sociological transformation. Author Bruce Mazlish’s A New Science breaks this concept down elegantly. The book documents the birth of sociology as a discipline, following it from the literary “lamenters” of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, William Wordsworth, Thomas Carlyle, and George Eliot to the early “revolutionary sociologists” of Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx, to the “scientific sociologists” of Ferdinand Tönnies, George Simmel, Emile Durkheim, and Max Weber.

Mazlish’s thesis is simple: the desire to understand the breakdown of past societal connections—and the impetus to document and describe those taking their place—drove the industrious creativity of these writers, philosophers, and scientists. The chief issue over which these thinkers obsessed—both fawning and condemning alike—was the idea of the cash nexus. Philosopher Thomas Carlyle coined the term, and so describes it best: “Cash Payment has become the sole nexus of man to man!” With this, Carlyle bemoans how a simple exchange of value brokered by cash replaced the ancient societal pillars of traditional community, relational trust, and empathetic generosity.

Though simple in theory, the advent of the cash nexus was in practice tectonic. As almost all value flowed through the exchange of cash, it came to pass that bartering, community obligation, and friendship became far less important. Hiring a stranger with money could now replace asking someone from your community to help for free (or on the promise of a future favor). This fascinating development animated Engels, Marx, Simmel, and Tönnies, and so produced what we now call sociology.

Our Information Age is now ushering in a development very similar to that of Carlyle’s cash nexus: we are fast-moving toward an “information nexus.” For nearly all of human history—until the Information Age, that is—humans accumulated skills, facts, and perspectives from interpersonal interaction. You’ve likely done this today with family or friends: simply asking someone to share their knowledge on a given topic (How old was Tom Cruise in the original Top Gun?) or to connect you with someone who possesses that knowledge (Do you know anyone who can teach me how to play volleyball like Tom Cruise in the original Top Gun?).

This arrangement has existed for thousands of years. In the last thirty years, however, the rise of large information brokers like Google, YouTube, and Wikipedia has greatly reduced the role of personal relationship—not to mention human interaction—involved in acquiring or sharing information. Instead of asking a friend if they know a plumber, we watch four YouTube videos and blunder along until we fix the issue ourselves. Instead of calling a friend who loves World War I to learn more about Joseph Joffre, we quickly Google him to figure out the date of his death. Instead of asking our parents how to best care for a newborn, we conduct a few searches on Amazon and purchase the parenting book with the highest reviews.

Put simply, we no longer connect with one another over information as often as we used to. Instead, we connect with a broker, a hub, a nexus. Information flows not directly between persons, but through intermediaries like Google. Surely, there are benefits to this shift. Imagine a plumber who knows how to replace a P-trap and can produce efficient social media content explaining the process for DIYers. The plumber may be doing this altruistically, or perhaps to gain and monetize a following (oh hey, cash nexus). Information-seekers then have the ability to search, browse, and consume on demand, comparing and contrasting myriad P-trap replacement techniques from plumbers, DIYers, and more. The information-holder is compensated by advertising revenue in a way that would have been impossible just twenty years ago. It is an efficient exchange for both parties, both asynchronous and effectively free.

That said, we remain ignorant of the short- and long-term detriments of such a paradigm shift. But it is already clear that we lose a great deal. At this, our advanced stage of the Information Age, there is a limited need for the holder or seeker to hold conversation, to express emotion, to produce a nascent relationship or connection. The information-seeker can see who created a given piece of content, and the content creator might see comments on their webpage; but they will likely never have a relationship.

Such is the nature of abstraction, leverage, and scale. The cash nexus diminishes human relationship as it pertains to value; the information nexus reduces the surface area of positive, productive, interpersonal interaction—thus eroding trust, affinity, and any semblance of shared meaning. The cash nexus radically reorganized society by changing who had money, who created value, and how people thought about their work; the information nexus is radically reorganizing the way our society engages with information, facts, and truth.

I do not mean to completely romanticize the pre-nexus information reality, of course. We recognize the beauty—and in many ways, clear superiority—of our instantaneous access to information. However, our acceptance of an information nexus society is already too naive, enthusiastic, and shallow. It robs us of the joys of sharing information in tighter, more intimate relationships with one another. After all, feeling is a vital component of the machinery of reason and cooperation.

Writing, criticism, and analysis concerning the rise of the cash nexus produced some of the greatest social scientists of the 19th and 20th centuries. For better or worse, the rise of the information nexus is sure to do the same in the 21st.

Tom White is a native New Yorker who works as writer, investor, researcher, and advisor. His many musings can be read online at www.tomwhitenoise.com. He penned this piece in collaboration with Wesley Braden.