Cities and how the algorithmic timeline kills innovation

All human invention is done by cities. Not by individuals. Every time something significant comes out, it is never out of some random village in the middle of nowhere by someone who nobody ever heard about - it’s usually from a city (or cluster) of people who were all working on that thing. Vienna invented some of the best music that ever existed. San Francisco some of the best software. Lagos some of the best African music.

Even though we see ourselves as independent organisms, we are not really. We are all cells of a larger entity - the city. The true life form that tamed this planet is not the human as an individual, but the meta-human, the collection of humans that ended up becoming a new creature.

Cities can be young and inventive, they can be middle-aged and stable, they can get old and cranky. Towns with the right DNA and aggressiveness grow to be cities, and towns that start off wrong and twisted remain tiny. They are unsuccessful organisms.

A city wants something. This thing is arbitrary, a sort of collective want by the people living in it. Each city is completely unique, but physiognomically and psychologically. An office worker in Tokyo may be quite similar to an office worker in Berlin, but Tokyo and Berlin and completely different when seen as independent living creatures.

Inside a city there are “organs”. Different things that do different things. From the people taking care of sewage to the people running the trains to the people inventing the new companies, they all are in charge of different parts of the city, but together they keep the beast alive.

Each organ has cells - we the people - who need to talk constantly to each other to keep doing what they do. Messages are constantly passed around and this keeps the city functioning.

For 8,000 years, our cities have been born, lived bright and then died. They live much longer than we do - new york is a young adult city at 400 years old. It’s still strong, still rich, a few gray hairs here or there, but it is in its prime. Baghdad is an old city at 1,263 years. The wrinkles are everywhere. It does not have any new ideas, it remembers it’s glorious past. It’s still a huge city, but nobody talks much about it anymore. Abuja is just a 49 years old, a child city still trying to undersstand where it belongs in the global family of cities.

But something dreadful has happened recently. The city has got a competitor. It does not look like a city, it’s something very different. The city does not recognize it as a city, but it is one.

It’s the social media apps. A city is really a bunch of humans who coalesce into a single, larger organism. That’s what social media is - it’s a whole bunch of people doing the same thing, and they become a type of city. It has its own life and its own ideas, and it can do things. The EndSars protests were an idea of the Nigerian social media collective. After all the burning and the deaths, everyone looked around, and tried to understand who was really responsible. But nobody was. There was truly no leader - it was an emergent idea out of a social media collective. The creature called Nigeria Twitter got angry that policemen were attacking its ‘cells’ and it started a massive attack on the police and the government. And the Government gave in, shut down the police force.

When a social media app is organised in a particular way, it gains independent life, just like a city does. It has operational bits, it has intellectual bits, and it has a way to reach out and affect things in the real world.

In recent months however, the twitter creature was executed by Elon Musk. I am not sure he quite understood what he was doing, but it happened.

Cities need organs - and each organ is a kind of group chat. It focuses on one thing and contributes to the whole. A bit like sub-reddits, but the component parts need to fit and contribute to the whole. In a dynamic, adapting system, this happens automatically. Every group finds what they do and do it.

The changes that were recently made to Twitter were like a surface level copy of TikTok - TikTok has a very unique algorithm that allows trends to flow and clusters to dynamically form and dissipate. There is a lot of teen and artistic energy there that overcomes constraints and forms communities.

Twitter copied it on the highest of levels, which is that they tried to figure out “what people want” and show them that. They used some kind of algorithm for that. The problem is that if you think of it as organs, they show the people operating the Brain what the people operating the Penis want. The algorithms truly cannot understand the nuance of what clusters are needed for this creature to survive. Even humans cannot understand it.

The algorithm steps in and destroys the organs, it destroys the clusters and interferes constantly in the communication of a single cluster. Then it tries to fix it by deciding that it will dictate what the organs are. But it has no idea. It has to do across thousands of very diverse and very large groups, for example South African Twitter is not Black American Twitter is not Comedian Twitter is not U.S Politics twitter. Each of these large groups has a bunch of sub-groups that are contributing in one way or the other.

All these result in the death of the creature. The organs start failing, and soon it becomes like Baghdad - still big, still many people, but culturally and intellectually irrelevant. Old.

Not all parts of a city are creative and exciting. A city with only art galleries would collapse very fast. Some parts of the city are tiny, niche communities doing their little thing. But it all keeps the creature alive.

A city needs to self organise, and the parts need to find where they belong. This is the prime directive of any benevolent dictator - figure out how to build a platform where people can find where they belong and thrive there.

A dictator that puts televisions on every street corner to broadcast their own opinion is starting a chain of actions that ultimately will lead to the destruction of that city. We’ve seen that happen in the past many, many times.