The Internet Is Not as New as You Think

Within the long history of telecommunication in nature, the web can be seen not as a mere tool, but as a living system.
A collage with two whales communicating with text bubbles.
Illustration: Elena Lacey; Getty Images

The internet is not what you think it is.

For one thing, it is not nearly as newfangled as we usually conceive of it. It does not represent a radical rupture with everything that came before, either in human history or in the vastly longer history of nature that precedes the first appearance of our species. It is, rather, only the most recent permutation of a complex of behaviors that is as deeply rooted in who we are as a species as anything else we do: our storytelling, our fashions, our friendships; our evolution as beings that inhabit a universe dense with symbols.

In order to convince you of this, it will help to zoom out for a while, far from the realm of human-made devices, away from the world of human beings altogether, to gain a suitably distanced and lucid view of the natural world that hosts us and everything we do. It will help, that is, to seek to understand the internet in its broad ecological context, against the background of the long history of life on earth.

Consider the elephant’s stomp: a small seismic event, sending its signature vibration to kin over a distance of kilometers. Or consider the clicks of a sperm whale, which, it is now thought, can sometimes be heard by familiars on the other side of the world. And it is not just sound that facilitates animal telecommunication. Many or perhaps most signals sent between members of the same species pass not through sonic vibrations, but through chemicals. Female emperor moths emit pheromones that can be detected by males more than 15 kilometers away, which, correcting for size, is a distance comparable to the one traversed by even the most resonant sperm whale’s click. Nor is there any reason to draw a boundary between animals and other living beings. Numerous plant species, among them tomatoes, lima beans, sagebrush, and tobacco, use airborne rhizobacteria to send chemical information to their conspecifics across significant distances, which in turn triggers defense-related gene expression and other changes in the growth and development of the recipient. Throughout the living world, telecommunication is more likely the norm than the exception.

At this point some might protest that “telecommunication” is being used here in an equivocal way. Some might object that, even if for the sake of argument it is conceded that sperm whales and elephants send out signals that may be processed as information—that is, as a symbolic encoding of propositional content that is then decoded by a conscious subject—the same surely may not be said of lima beans.

Let us grant, if only to avoid unnecessary complications, that lima beans are not conscious. We may still ask why, when telecommunication in both conscious and unconscious life forms evidently involves the same principles and mechanisms, we assume that our own telecommunication is a product of consciousness, rather than being an ancient system that arose in the same way as lima bean signaling, and only belatedly began to allow our human consciousness to ride along with it. The former assumption seems to get things exactly the wrong way around: Telecommunication networks have been around for hundreds of millions of years.

Isn’t it possible that the most recent outgrowths of our own species-specific telecommunicative activity—most notably, the internet—are in fact something more like an outgrowth latent from the beginning in what we have always done, an ecologically unsurprising and predictable expression of something that was already there?

And could it be, correlatively, that the internet is not best seen as a lifeless artifact, contraption, gadget, or mere tool, but as a living system, or as a natural product of the activity of a living system? If we wish to convince ourself that this suggestion is not mere poetic rhapsodizing, but something grounded in a sort of truth about both technology and living systems, it might help to consider the long history of attempts to imagine telecommunication technologies through the model of animal bodies and vital forces.

Human telecommunication requires not just knowledge of how to build devices to capture signals, but also some understanding of the nature of the medium through which those signals move. One common cosmological theory in antiquity took the universe itself to be a sort of living body, and thus imagined that physically distant parts of the physical world are in constant feedback relations with one another, where any change in one region is echoed or mirrored in any other, just as the pain of a rock landing on the extremity of my foot is felt not only in my foot, but also in my somewhat distant head. The universe was thus a “cybernetic” system, in the sense described by Norbert Wiener in the mid-20th century. Like the animal and the machine for Wiener, the universe as a whole for many ancient theorists was characterized by a circular causality or signal looping.

The causal interconnectedness of all parts of an animal body was well captured in the Hippocratic motto, Sympnoia pantōn, which may be translated variously as “The conspiration of all things,” or, in a somewhat more literal but also exactly equivalent rendering of the verb conspire: “The breathing-together of all things.” The Hippocratics were physicians, and they understood this motto to encompass the interconnectedness of the parts of the body, the way in which my lungs filling up with air is also a replenishing of the life of my toes and fingers, and the top of my head; the way in which my foot’s pain is also my head’s pain; or the way in which an illness of the kidneys may give rise to symptoms and morbidities in other parts of the body. Later philosophers, notably in the Stoic tradition, extended this account of physiology to the world as a whole. Thus the Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius, invoking the metaphor of weaving, implores us to think of the universe as a single living being, observing “how intertwined in the fabric is the thread and how closely woven the web.”

If the web of all things is so closely woven, then nature itself, independently of the tools we develop to channel it or tap into it, already possesses the potential for near-instantaneous transmission of a signal from one place to another. It is just this sort of transmission that our wireless communication today realizes. But we did not need the “proof of concept” that has finally arrived in only the most recent decades in order to feel the force of the conviction that it must, somehow, exist.

Those ancient authors who recognized the possibility of telecommunication generally understood that while the natural medium through which signals are to be sent may preexist humanity, we are nonetheless going to have to rely on our own technological ingenuity to tap into and exploit that medium. The devices envisioned by these authors were often rather simple, and even in their own era were perfectly familiar and mundane.

In the first-century fantasy novel A True History, the Greek-language author Lucian of Samosata imagines a trip to the moon, where he discovers a “mighty great glass lying upon the top of a pit of no great depth, whereinto, if any man descend, he shall hear everything that is spoken upon the earth.” This is a principle of simple amplification, whose proof of concept is already present whenever a person enters a seaside grotto or a cave that causes voices to echo.

To some extent, telecommunication is just amplification: Simply to speak to a person in a normal voice is already to telecommunicate, even if at naturally audible distances we have learned to be unimpressed by this most of the time. But with a glass or a saucer or ear trumpet, the ordinary qualities of sound waves are magnified, and the possibility for total global surveillance of all conversations from a satellite of our planet becomes thinkable.

Often, in early attempts to appropriate natural forces for telecommunicative ends, it was not a matter of amplifying known powers of nature, but of manipulating nature in new ways to draw out hidden or merely suspected powers. In the middle of the 19th century, a French anarchist and con man by the name of Jules Allix managed to convince at least a handful of Parisians that he had invented a “snail telegraph”—that is, a device that would communicate with another paired device at a great distance, thanks to the power of what Allix called “escargotic commotion.” The idea was simple, if completely fabricated. Based on the widely popular theory of animal magnetism proposed by Franz Mesmer at the end of the 18th century, Allix claimed that snails are particularly well suited to communicate by a magnetism-like force through the ambient medium. Once two snails have copulated with one another, he maintained, they are forever bound to each other by this force, and any change brought about in one of them immediately brings about a corresponding change in the other: an action at a distance.

In a feigned demonstration given in Paris in 1850, Allix takes, or pretends to take, two snails that have previously copulated, and he places each of them in its own small slot on its own device, each of which corresponds to the same letter of the French alphabet. Then messages are sent from one to the other by successively manipulating the snails in the appropriate slots in order to spell out French words. Allix receives the message: LUMIÈRE DIVINE (DIVINE LIGHT) from a correspondent purportedly in America.

Allix predicts that at some point it will be possible to make pocket-size devices using particularly tiny species of snails, and that we will then be able to send messages throughout the day— “texts,” you might call them—to our friends and family as we go about the city. He envisions being able to receive newspapers from the whole world on these devices, and to follow the deliberations of parliament. When Allix is exposed as a grifter, he absconds from Paris, having already taken the money of his gullible investors.

The story of Jules Allix reminds us that a rigorous historian of science may learn just as much from the fakes and frauds as from the genuine article: Even when someone is lying, they are nonetheless doing the important work of imagining future possibilities.

Allix’s device, as he envisions it, is in a sense a species of wi-fi. The would-be inventor knew that the earliest telegraphy had required two conductive wires—one for the signal to go out and another for it to return. But, as Allix explains, after experiments in Paris beginning in 1845, it was proven that the earth itself can function as a conductive medium and can thus take on the role of one of the two wires. His project, then, is to allow nature to replace both of the wires, and to allow the incoming and outgoing signals to be conducted between the two devices through a medium that preexists both devices as well as the human desire to telecommunicate. In this minimal sense, the sperm whale’s clicks, the elephant’s vibrations, the lima bean plant’s rhizobacterial emissions, and indeed Lucian’s listening disc, are all varieties of wi-fi too, sending a signal through a preexisting “ether” to a spatially distant fellow member of their kind (and also, sometimes, to competitors and to prey of different kinds).

It was just as common from antiquity through the modern period to envision nature not as pervaded by an ether, but as a wired or connected network—that is, as a true and proper web: a system of hidden filaments or threads that bind all things. Such a system is instanced paradigmatically in what may be thought of as the original web, the one woven by the spider, presumed in many cultures to be the first inspiration for all human textile weaving.

The spider’s web may be properly—meaning not only metaphorically—considered as the locus of its extended cognition. An arachnid’s nerves do not extend into the filaments it spreads out from its body, but the animal is evolved to apprehend vibrations in these filaments as a fundamental dimension of its sensory experience. The spider’s sensation is not “enhanced” by the vibrations it receives from the web, any more than my hearing is enhanced by the presence of a cochlea in my inner ear. Perceiving through a web is simply what it is to perceive the world as a spider.

We ordinarily imagine that our own webs of wires are enhancements, and not intrinsic to what it is to perceive as a human, to what it is to be a human, since they did not emerge together with the human species, but are only a much more recent addition to the repertoire of the species. The web of a spider is a species-specific and species-defining feature of the spider, while the internet, we usually suppose, is a superaddition to the human. The important thing to register is that the spider’s web is a web in at least some of the same respects that the World Wide Web is a web: It facilitates reports, to a cognizing or sentient being that occupies one of its nodes, about what is going on at other of its nodes.

Such webs may be found throughout nature. The natural webs that have lately enjoyed the most frequent comparisons to the internet are those we know from the vegetal world, whether a field of grass with its subterranean creeping rootstalks, or a grove of trees with its mycorhizal filaments connecting a vast underground network of roots, whose exchanges can now be tracked by a technique known as “quantum dot tagging.” In the 1990s and early 2000s, the observation that certain features of human society, including human communication networks, might be “rhizomoidal” in character— that is, might have a structure resembling that of the subterranean networks of roots connecting the blades in a field of grass—was associated preeminently with the 20th-century French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. In the influential 1980 work, A Thousand Plateaus, written together with Félix Guattari, Deleuze identified a number of characteristics of rhizomes, many of which seem equally to characterize the internet: A rhizome connects any point to any other point, a rhizome operates by spreading and offshoots rather than by reproduction, a rhizome has no center and no head, among others.

As a result of his reflections on the rhizome, Deleuze, who died in 1995, is often regarded as an early visionary of the internet, whose vision was the more vividly confirmed, the more human beings came to rely on massive decentralized systems for their own daily communications.

Quite independently of Deleuzean theory, in the past decade or so some plant scientists, along with their journalistic ancillaries, have also come to appreciate the internet-like qualities of the underground systems of exchange, facilitated by bacteria and mycorhizal fungi, that are realized along the roots of trees. The “wood wide web,” as journalists have called it, is a “complex and collaborative structure,” in which trees enlist the assistance of numerous other life forms in order to maintain themselves and one another in good health, and also, it appears, to exchange vital information with one another at long distances.

We tend to suppose that whatever is species-specific or essential to a given biological kind cannot ineliminably involve another species, that what it is to be a panther or an oak ought to be something that could be spelled out without implicating fleas or moss in the description. But the tendency to think this way is mostly our inheritance of an inadequate and un-ecological folk-metaphysics. For example, scientists were so hesitant to see the fungus lining tree roots for what it was—namely, a life- preserving symbiont—that for a long time they took it to be a harmful parasite. In reality, symbiosis is common enough and central enough to the various species implicated in it that it is often impossible to understand what a species is in terms that bracket the existence of any other species. This is certainly true of the symbionts that make up the wood wide web.

The symbiotic relationship between fungi and plant roots is coevolved with the individual species involved in the relationship. If the relationship does not involve technology, in our usual understanding, it certainly does involve what Immanuel Kant understood by the word technique: the beings of nature, through their own internal capacity, making use of what is at hand, or at root, to bring about their proper ends. The technique involved in symbiosis has also at times been compared to the process of animal domestication by human beings. For example, in the fungus/algae pairing that makes up the two-species life form known as lichen, the fungus is sometimes described as a sort of “algae farmer.” And if we agree with the commonplace that a domestic pig or goat is an “artificial” being, in that it is nature transformed in the pursuit of human ends, why should we not also agree that the algae is farmed by fungus or the fungus is enlisted by the tree to pass chemical messages and nutrient packets along its roots (much as the internet is said to facilitate “packet switching”)? Why should we not agree that this technique is technology too? Or conversely, and perhaps more palatably for those who do not wish to rush to collapse the divide between the natural and the artificial: Why should we not see our own technology as natural technique?

At least since Kant it has frequently been noted that living nature, or what we now call the biological world, presents a particular difficulty in our effort to distinguish between justified and unjustified carrying-over of explanations from one domain to another, and moreover that whatever justification there may be for doing so is not going to come from a deepened knowledge of empirical science.

When Kant proclaimed in the Critique of the Power of Judgment that there will never be a “Newton for the blade of grass”—that is, that no one will account for the generation and growth of grass in terms of blind mechanical laws of nature in the way that Newton had managed to do a century earlier for the motions of the planets, the tides, cannonballs, and other objects of interest to mathematical physics—he was not simply reporting on the state of research in the life sciences. Rather, Kant supposed, we will always be cognitively constrained, simply given the way our minds work, to apprehend biological systems in a way that includes, rightly or wrongly, the idea of an end-oriented design, even if we can never have any positive idea—or, as Kant would say, any determinate concept—of what the ends are or of who or what did the designing. In other words, we are constrained to cognize living beings and living systems in a way that involves an analogy to the things that we human beings design for our own ends—the clepsydras and ploughs, the smartphones and fiber-optic networks—even if we can never ultimately determine whether this analogy is only an unjustified carrying-over of explanations from a domain where they do belong into one where they do not.

Kant understood the problem as an intractable one, arising simply from the structure of human cognition. Yet this did not prevent subsequent generations from assuming dogmatic positions on one of the two possible sides of the debate concerning the boundary between the natural on the one hand and the artificial or cultural on the other. “Do male ducks rape female ducks?” is a question that sparked and sustained heated and ultimately futile debates in the late 20th century. The so-called sociobiologists, led by E. O. Wilson, took it as obvious that they do, while their opponents, notably Stephen Jay Gould, insisted that rape is by definition a morally charged category of action and so also by definition a category that pertains only to the human sphere; that it is thus an unjustified anthropomorphization of ducks to attribute the capacity for such an action to them; and that moreover it is dangerous to do so, since to say that ducks rape is to naturalize rape and in turn to open up the possibility of viewing human rape as morally neutral. If rape is so widespread as to be found even among ducks, the worry went, then some might conclude that it is simply a natural feature of the range of human actions and that it is hopeless to try to eliminate it. And the sociobiologists would reply: Perhaps, but just look at what that drake is doing, and how the female struggles to get away, and try to find a word that captures what you are seeing better than “rape.”

The debate is, again, unresolved, for reasons that Kant could probably have anticipated. We can never fully know what it is like to be a duck, and so we cannot know whether what we are seeing in nature is a mere external appearance of what would be rape if it were occurring among humans, or whether it is truly, properly, duck rape. The same goes for ant cannibalism, for gay penguins, and so many other animal behaviors that some people would prefer to think of as distinctly human, either because they are so morally atrocious that extending them to other living beings risks normalizing them by naturalizing them, or because they are so valued that our sense of our own specialness among creatures requires us to see the appearance of these behaviors in other species as mere appearance, as simulation, counterfeit, or aping. And the same holds for the mycorhizal networks that connect groves of trees. Are these “communication networks” in the same sense as the internet is, or is the “wood wide web” only a metaphor?

It is not to be flippant or to give up too easily to say that the determination is ours to make, and that no further empirical inquiry will tell us whether such a comparison or assimilation taps into some real truth about the world. The choice is ours to make, though we would perhaps do better not to make a choice at all, but instead, with Kant, to entertain the evident similarity between the living system and the artifice with an appropriate critical suspension. Our minds will just keep returning to the analogy between nature and artifice, between organism and machine, between living system and network. And the fact that our minds are doing this says something about who we are and how we make sense of the world around us. What we in any case cannot help but notice is that, like a network of roots laced with fungal filaments, like a field of grass, the internet too is a growth, an outgrowth, an excrescence of the species-specific activity of Homo sapiens.

If we were not so attached to the idea that human creations are of an ontologically different character than everything else in nature—that, in other words, human creations are not really in nature at all, but extracted out of nature and then set apart from it—we might be in a better position to see human artifice, including both the mass-scale architecture of our cities and the fine and intricate assembly of our technologies, as a properly natural outgrowth of our species-specific activity. It is not that there are cities and smartphones wherever there are human beings, but cities and smartphones themselves are only the concretions of a certain kind of natural activity in which human beings have been engaging all along.

To see this, or at least to appreciate it or take it seriously, is not to reduce human beings to ants, or to reduce love letters (or indeed sexts) to pheromone signals. We can still love our own species even as we seek to retrain it, at the end of a few millennia of forgetfulness, to feel at home in nature. And part of this must mean seeking to expose the pretense in the idea that our productions have a more exceptional character than they in fact do alongside everything else nature has yielded.

The ecology of the internet, on this line of thinking, is only one more recent layer of the ecology of the planet as a whole, which overlays networks upon networks: prairie dogs calling out to their kin the exact shape and motions of an arriving predator; sagebrushes emitting airborne methyl jasmonate to warn others of their kind of a coming insect invasion; blue whales singing songs for their own inscrutable reasons, perhaps simply for the joy of free and directionless discourse of the sort that human beings—now sometimes aided by screens and cables and signals in the ether—call by the name of chatting.

This essay is excerpted from The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is: A History, A Philosophy, a Warning*, by Justin E. H. Smith. The book will be published this month by Princeton University Press.*


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