#14: World of Edges
One of Benjamin Bratton’s most compelling ideas is the concept of deep address—the extreme condition in which every “thing” in the world, every person, every event, every raindrop, and every piece of information are recorded as data, indexed, and saved in databases for later retrieval. This is of course a mere extension of how we currently live: A huge amount of reality already leaves a reliable if incomplete data trace, from how we scroll through our Facebook feeds to what the weather is like at any specific set of geographical coordinates on the planet. More of the world is brought within this legible realm every day, making Bratton’s thought experiment ever more realistic.
The incessant growth of information, for all its benefits, creates a zero-sum domain with unmistakable winners and losers. In the Super Bowl and countless other sporting events, as well as the Oscars and the election, Vegas offers a multitude of prop bets: which teams will win the coin toss; how long the National Anthem lasts, what color of Gatorade gets dumped on the winning teams coach. Meanwhile, the increased financialization of the world proceeds by similar, increasingly granular predictions about future changes in value that are also basically just sophisticated bets. Without unambiguous, retrievable data, none of these bets can be settled, much less made. Thus the prediction market expands alongside the volume of data collected.
The key to betting, of course, is having an edge—an information asymmetry, knowing something about the probability of a future event that most other people don’t know. As information eats the world, everything tracked becomes a potential bet, and certain bettors will possess bigger and bigger edges. Notice how the vast majority of new information created today lives in places where you or I can’t get it—within the walled gardens owned by Apple, Google, Amazon, or countless other entities. Almost every new piece of data accompanies a steeper asymmetry in who can use it, and the world is increasingly made of edges as much as of information.
Reads:
The New Aesthetic is a cool Tumblr by James Bridle I just discovered (I haven't said "cool Tumblr" in a while, joke's on me)
Tech's Frightful Five: Farhad Manjoo on the extent to which a few huge companies rule our lives.
A mysterious doomsday-prepper house/raft that docked to Manhattan this week. Waiting to find out more.
Until next time,
Drew