When you take your daily random walk down the Internet, chances are that you won’t see me. You have to look really, really hard, and even then: good luck. If you accidentally take the wrong turn, and end up in a place called “github” then, well, chances would be slightly higher, but still. That’s my “social network” where I follow exactly zero people, am followed by around thirty nameless folks, and it’s a large website, with a nerdy name, where no one talks to anyone if not for exchanging weird inhuman symbols that look like exactly what they are: stuff for computers.
The number of reasons why somebody would, in fact, stumble upon me on the Internet is well approximated by a single digit number: zero. Somehow, even my professional email address isn’t cluttered too badly with spam. I doubt if I get more than ten spam emails every day. I must be not very good at my job.
Every now and then, however, I witness an attempt to contact me, and, even though it feels as unlikely as a supernova implosion, I listen to it. Someone tries to tell me something, and relies on the magic of the Internet to do so, like signs coming from the galaxy. Whenever this happens, my first reaction is “who the heck is this person?”, except that “heck” is not the actual word in my head. My second reaction is “how did they find me?”, as if I was Jason Bourne’s nerd brother. It turns out (surprise!) that I, too, used to take walks down the Internet, and digital fingerprints leave too deep of a mark to erase.
For the past several years I have been getting a small but steady number of such signs. They are like low frequency, high amplitude signals. A couple of years ago, I decided to investigate, put on my Jodie Foster hat, and started digging. I mean, I didn’t need to dig anything at all as it took literally a couple of seconds to find what I wanted: people are really easy to find on the Internet. I think they like it this way.
One of these signals was sent to me by a young lady whom I found in about three seconds on LinkedIn. I literally asked her how she knew me. She told me that something I made had been used at her school in a computer science class. I don’t know in what form it was “used”, but I guess as teaching material. I think she said “it’s one of the first references we give”. She did say “we”. She was a very-important-person at this school (like the president of something), which was (is?) an educational institution where older students mentor younger students, and there are no professors. Or so I recall.
The funny part of the story is that I don’t remember the name of the school, and I don’t have a quick way to find it out, because I cannot access that conversation anymore, because I have since deleted my LinkedIn account. Oh, what a glorious day that was. I texted one of my friends and bragged about finally being 100% social-networks free. The text was via Whatsapp.
Anyway, the signals keep coming at a frequency that seems rather random. I don’t make it easy for them. The “About” page on my personal blog doesn’t have any contact means. It says: “if you really need to talk to me, open a discussion in github”. You nerd.
Invariably, though, the Internet will surprise me, and thus someone took my word for it, but, instead of a discussion, they added a comment at the bottom of a specific page. It wasn’t just any page, it was (nerds alert!) a commit hash page. Which, I know, is a very weird pair of words, “commit hash”, but it doesn’t matter a bit.
I guess my point is, how did they know about that page? It turns out, they found it the way humans always find each other: because of common problems. Let me say a bit more about this.
A distinctive trait of all nerds on the Internet is that they are not shy of their hacks. They take pride in them. Whenever I struggle my way through something, if I win the battle then I never keep the solution secret just for myself. Usually, I put it out there, you know, like we used to do when we were young, on a blog, just in case someone on the Internet finds it useful. Because you never know who’s out there. Thus, this person had faced a technical issue that I had faced too, and found my solution, and it did the trick for him. I guess Google still works sometimes.
And I guess my real point is about the irrationally exhilarating experience of seeing someone, just one more human out of eight billion-odd on this planet, take two scarce minutes out of their day to write “Hey dude. This stuff you made works. It helped me. Thanks.”
Take that and multiply it by one million. Is that how a human that helps one million other humans feel? Or maybe, when it gets up to those numbers, then it’s too shallow of a help — not a real one? Are connections more real when they are made on top of some hard fought battle? Is low frequency but high amplitude better, somehow? How much more is that worth?
I don’t know, of course. How could I? I operate exclusively at low frequency. The most famous thing I made has about seventy-seven stars (stars are the “likes” of the nerds).
I was using YouTube a few weeks ago — Oh, come on, you didn’t really think that I never, ever, never in my life watched a YouTube video, did you? I work forty hours a week facing a computer screen, what do you think I do in those hours? — and it was a video of someone who struggled a lot before finally achieving something that I can relate to. I was actually moved. It felt like the guy was next to me dripping sweat and tears.
I guess my other point is this: People on the Internet think that the other people on the Internet are stupid. But they are not. We are not. More often than people think, the other people can tell fake from real. I believe they don’t do it vocally — because what’s the benefit of calling someone out? — but they do tell the difference. We do tell the difference between fake and real, even on the Internet. We just smile, knowingly, and use our best poker face while we think “you idiot liar”.
On the other hand, these days, if you call someone out on the Internet and start a controversial conversation that takes just two messages before erupting in a verbal fight… Well, then you are a bot. You are one of those very intelligent bots that people (the former group of people) call AI even though they can barely make a legal chess move, and would get crushed even by me blindfold. Yes, I play chess like all sensible nerds.
Don’t get me wrong. AI is a good Internet thing. It’s good because it makes me more efficient at my job, and thus I don’t need to talk about work with other people, and I can talk to them about music and books, and movies, and food, and I don’t feel the need to brag about my work on the Internet where weird bots reply with nonsense, and I can delete my social accounts because, after all, the AI is doing the work for me, and I can enjoy a longer morning run and a longer breakfast, and still be done by 5pm, while you are still sitting there “prompting” nonsense and asking why it doesn’t work. I mean, all of that would be possible if I knew enough about computers to make the most out of AI. Like, you know, things I’d have learned in ten years of education and twenty years of hard practice without AI.
Thus, sometimes, I get high amplitude signals from other humans on the Internet, and I can tell they are not bots because we, humans, can recognize the hard fought drops of sweat when we see some.
I guess that’s my point, then. Bots don’t sweat.