“I didn’t really realize just how bad it was until I saw it for myself.”
“You know, I’d heard about all these things going on, but I’m only now really seeing just how extreme they are.”
How many times have you heard a variation on this theme? I would wager plenty. We now have far more information available to us than we can process or contextualize, from farther and farther afield. Understanding and interpreting the consequences of our ideas becomes more and more difficult, to the point that truly digging into them becomes a rare and notable phenomenon that truly takes us aback when it happens. The catalyst for such a thing, in addition, is usually not logical, but emotional or intentional – you are either shocked by something or go in wanting to know more.
What about the rest of the time, then? We see more than ever before – but what does it make us feel?
The Windowed Life
Picture the following scene.
You look up from this article and take a step to the left to stretch. You look out of your closed third-floor window overlooking a busy street. Sunlight beams down to the earth and through the glass window with all the intensity of a clear noon, bathing the world outside in light and baking it in the heat. There is a clear contrast between the white concrete of the sidewalk and the black asphalt of the road just outside your building, obstructed only by the shade of trees planted on the sidewalk. You hear, muffled by the glass, the occasional blast of horns in traffic, but not the rumble of the engines you know to be there.
The air conditioner in your room coughs once again, bringing with it cold and dry air – a contrast to the never-ending heat and humidity outside, that forms a cloying mist that clings to your skin and wraps you in heat. Arching your back and stretching it out, pushing your arms out to your sides to exert your dominance over your space, you smile as you feel your shoulders and back loosen up. With a smile, you sit back down and return to reading.
How about another example?
You wait at a bus stop, gloved hands pinched snugly in the opposite armpit as you wait for the bus to come. You let out a sigh, and a little puff of fog floats in front of your eyes, before being swept away by the wind. The cold seeps into your bones, defying all your attempts to keep it out, and you squint to fend off the wind. Thankfully, with the screech of the brakes and the familiar rumble of the engine, the bus finally pulls up and you eagerly trot up the stairs, ticket in hand ever since you bought it.
The difference between the inside and the outside is like night and day. Crisp heat touches your skin and you almost feel little crystals of ice melt off your face as you step down the aisle to find a seat. Finding one by the window, you sidle over and take the chair, unzipping your jacket in the heat. Leaning on the fuzzy seat back, you look out the window at the cold and windy outside that you just left, separated only by a single pane of glass.
Despite being able to see the outside through the glass, you are isolated from the noise and temperature of the outside, able to see what’s going in without experiencing everything about it. Glass allows you to see the effects of the wind and heat without having to be in it. Transparent but not porous, glass is a mediator.
Glass, the Mediating Material
Glass surrounds us everywhere we go. Windows, windshields (or windscreens for UK English speakers), phone/laptop/TV screens[1], car windows, sunglasses, reading glasses, vision-corrective glasses – all of them made of glass, and with the explicit goal of allowing us to see in ways differently than we previously could. Tempered glass is designed to break safely, without leaving shards, one-way or mirrored glass to prevent the sun from coming in, stained glass to show beautiful patterns while letting light through.
Glass can also change how we see things. Microscopes and telescopes allow us to see things too small or too far for the naked eye. Funhouse mirrors perform tricks of the light, modifying what is reflected in the mirror, rather than the flat sheet of reflective glass we’re more familiar with. Screens allow us to see things from far away or that don’t exist – just think of TV’s, cellphones, and laptop screens or computer monitors. One of the largest operating systems in the world is even called… Windows.
We are surrounded by glass – hard, non-porous, transparent, and a decent insulator, glass is most often used to see through it while isolating us from the conditions on the other side. Glass keeps out the bad weather, the temperature, the smell, the extraneous detail – allowing only the sight of the scene, where we visually get most of our information from. We receive more and more of our information in this form – through screens and windows, isolated from their full context, distilled down to only the visual component and bounded by the window’s frame, or the screen border. If you’re not conscious and careful of this fact, it becomes easy to see what others want you to see, it being literally impossible to stick your head out of a window you don’t believe opens.
When you spend your whole life looking through windows, it’s easy to forget that you’re looking through one to begin with – or that someone else is looking back.
The Information Snow Globe
The best model I can think of is the snowglobe. The snowglobe contains us within, encased in a dome of glass that both allows us to see out of it and into it. Privacy and ignorance are now endangered if not banished, as the World of Glass allows us to see and be seen by all. Privacy, we attempt to protect but likely no longer possess due to the transparency of glass. Ignorance does not stand up to the transparency of glass either, with the endless deluge of information that we receive acting to tell us that we should know something because it’s so easy. Below, we tackle each in turn.
Data is the new oil – though it is likely more valuable than that. Like oil, much effort has been expended to collect, process, and deploy that data, culminating in the concept of big data. Big data, powered by the falling costs of physical storage and Internet connectivity, refers to the collection, analysis, and presentation of data to reveal actionable insights – a generic term for something in the data that we can do something about, that we haven’t already done. These actionable insights, in turn, allow us to make decisions that improve how things are done – more profitable, more efficient, or better for the consumer.
In this environment, it is only logical to collect as much data is possible – as processing is an integral part of big data, and one cannot process what one does not possess. This creates an overwhelming drive to increase data collection, which includes public sources, personal surveys, among other things. Social media is the best example of this trend, with immense resources going into using and monetizing this medium. This is because social media generates massive amounts of pre-structured and pre-identified data through user-generated content – posts only accepting specific types and formats of data and needing to be saved on the company’s servers. In addition to the internal data that any corporation can gain the old way, through internal records of sales numbers and their own market research, the cornucopia of data that social media provides can supply a deeper look into consumer dynamics and people’s response to your brand, something that is difficult to grasp through the guise of a company survey, but likely to come up in a social media discussion. Companies can now target customers with pinpoint efficiency via targeted advertising, with the ads you see on social media matching your preferences. The ability for the digital world to see into your life is so complete that it almost seems like they are listening in – when they may simply hear more than what you know about yourself.
This explosion of data is a cornucopia for governments, corporations, and media large and small, who can now use this data to further shape and mold public opinion, in pursuit of markets hare, profit, or popularity – whichever suits them. Mass surveillance, once a flight of fancy, is now a profitable reality – while privacy has likely done the reverse.
At the same time, however, the amount of information available to the individual has exploded past what we used to have. This same information explosion that allowed social media to track us has also allowed us to see into the rest of the world with similar ease. Wikipedia, an encyclopedia everyone can contribute to, is the best example of this, allowing us to learn of things we’ve never heard of. The same social media that collects our data allows things we never would have heard of to catapult into popularity, such as the Mexican Exploding Hammer festival, cooking ancient recipes for ourselves, or watching a lawyer calmly pick locks of all shapes and sizes as a hobby. Educational uses of the Internet also abound. Project Gutenberg digitizes old books for digital audiences, allowing them to spread long after physical copies go out of print. Academics can now run personal blogs talking about their work, such as Peter Turchin’s Cliodynamica, or a Substack like Adam Tooze’s
.The deluge of information is to the point that there are now books on how to organize all the information you may have to deal with. As I’ve covered before in The Information Superhighway, we are dealing with more information than we frankly know what to do with. Daniel J. Levitin’s The Organized Mind, for example, teaches us psychological tricks on how to maintain all of the information we need. An instructive example was the one on passwords.
Passwords, particularly now where there is more security, often require at least one capital letter, one number, and one special character. It is also recommended that you never repeat passwords, because if one of your passwords is found, that same one will likely be tried with all your accounts. Since this often makes passwords more difficult to remember by breaking up the flow of words, Levitin suggests that you come up with a “root” password, which he calls the standard formula. The standard formula should contain all the usual requirements – capital letter, number, and special character. All of your actual passwords can now simply be the standard formula with additional text added on the end – std formula + something to differentiate them.
This endless availability of information also has a downside. Because any individual piece of information is now more available than ever, it is assumed that one possesses all of those individual pieces of information. Ignorance or simply not knowing something, once accepted as a reality of life, is now a cardinal sin, something that should be impossible in The World of Glass.
At the same time as we are seen more than ever, we also see more than ever.
The Panopticon and Sousveillance
Zooming out our metaphor a bit, the question arises. If we live under a figurative dome of glass, in our individual snow globes, what is there to see? Are we all just watching each other in our snow globes, using each other as cheap entertainment and entertaining others in turn with our reactions? Are we all just engaged in an endless loop of watching and reacting to one another?
If the popularity of reaction videos and streamers is any indication, then yes.
But as established, governments, corporations, and media, especially social media, watch us, while sitting in our glass globes means we can always watch them as well. They may have helped build this World of Glass, but they are not immune to it either. Social media scandals rocking brands is nothing new, and social media sites themselves suffer devastating data leaks, despite them being the owner of the data and observer of all that occurs on their platform. While they can take greater pains to stay private, the World of Glass demands that we can see them as they see is.
This brings to mind two concepts of surveillance that may help us see what we like from here – the Panopticon and Sousveillance.
The Panopticon, by far the more popular of the two, is Jeremy Bentham’s concept for a prison manned by a single guard and watching a large number of inmates. The trick is that all the inmates are arranged in a half circle around the single guard’s observation tower. Because none of the inmates are sure that the guard is observing them, they are forced to self-regulate for fear of being caught. In the same way, the guard, observed keenly by all the inmates, would be forced not to act in an objectionable manner, as his actions are observed by all the inmates. By subjecting both sides to mutual observation, he hoped that they would be humane to one another. Mirroring the ability of the media, social or otherwise, to report on the powerful, and the justice system to imprison others, the Panopticon definitely has some things to it.
The inmates of the Panopticon, however, can observe each other, and with the modern phenomenon of user-generated content on social media, they can now publicly name and shame one another. This is covered by the concept of sousveillance – where members of the public perform the duty of surveillance normally assigned to larger organizations. Rather than being policed by a distant guard, we simply point cameras and microphones at one another, to cut out the middleman and serve justice immediately. You can definitely think of examples of sousveillance, from recording Karens, semi-professional scam-busting channels like Coffeezilla, or simply social media posts calling for action on something or other.
Combined, these two ideas produce a world where information is made by and received by all, where recording and sharing information is not the prerogative of any class of people, but almost an imperative for everyone. Transparency has become the norm, rather than the exception, and we may or may not be better for it.
Part of and Apart from
Seeing everything through glass has other effects, as well. Being young, and therefore brought up reading book sor seeing things from across a screen or in the window, I often feel a generalized sense of disconnection. Like watching my own life through a screen, I feel like I’m part of, but apart from, the world around me. I even make fourth-wall breaking and meta jokes to myself at times, framing things I’m a part of with fictional tropes, fitting in perfectly with watching things through a snowglobe and knowing you’re being watched.
The knowledge we’re being watching and being watched at all times can easily cause that. For those too conscious of it, like myself, everything must be thought through, checked to see if it may be offensive or ruin the plans of others, constatnly looking around to check for objections. Like a stage director, one attempts to direct their own life based on what they believe others wish to see, despite only having an incomplete and half-baked realization of what others might want - or even who they might really be.
In addition, because of our ready access to both the past and the future, it becomes very easy to consider things both before and beyond our individual lives. This acute consciousness of our roots in the past, the dismal data of the present, and the ensuing fearful forecasts of the future allows us to feel that we are only observers, forgetting that we are actors in the play of life, not the audience. The feeling of being separated from those around us by a globe of glass, forced to watch as things go their own way without the ability to intervene, is a difficult one to reconcile with our modern conception of individual will and action.
Almost as if we rage, rage, against the death of agency.
See Everything, Observe Nothing
I heard of a historical political party in the United States called the American Party, colloquially called the Know Nothing party. Conspiracies and populist positions aside, I want to hone in on their nickname. Originally used to keep the details of their party secret (by claiming to know nothing), I think that their nickname was actually far ahead of their time.
The immense amount of media that we are expected to consume, thanks to the rapidly disappearing cost of being “informed”, is also a rapidly diminishing slice of the incredibly complex and interconnected phenomenon that we attempt to understand. In this milleu, it has become taboo - almost a confession of sin - to admit that you don’t know something, even if you don’t.
I think that there’s a place for a new Know Nothing party, as a frank admission that it is impossible to truly understand many of the things we are expected to know about. We’re expected to learn how the government works to make informed votes, what our laws are to avoid running afoul of them, the basics of every discipline, the rules of banks, the regulations around money, and so on and so on. In theory, at least, the modern person is more informed than ever before, seeing more of the world than someone from even only twenty or thirty years ago. In practice, being “more informed” means having seen more, but not necessarily understanding more - simply because the amount needed to understand something has increased faster. In this kind of climate, admitting that you don’t know something - even if only in private - is liberating.
I don’t know what I’m talking about here - I’m just relaying what I’ve experienced, and hoping it resonates.
Conclusions
Despite the length of this essay, I think there is still much more to write about the World of Glass. Infinitely easy communication and information makes it difficult to discern true messages from false ones, where before they would be vetted. The information space becomes choked with opposing viewpoints, to the point that individuals sometimes choose to ignore it entirely. What happens when some people’s glass globes are more transparent and others less so – as is often the case with large corporations and governments vis-à-vis the individual? When does sousveillance cross the line from whistle-blowing to vigilantism? Is attention, as in the Attention Economy, now a resource to be rationed and paid for, rather than something we choose to give and receive freely? Will we ever reach a Peak Info, where there is more information than we can actually use? Will Large Language Models handle that for us, allowing us to know less and do more?
Like opposite barbershop mirrors, the World of Glass is a gateway to an endless deluge of information, advertisement, and messaging, naturally resulting in endless self-reflection, a bevy of complications and incalculable higher-order effects. The sheer complexity of the network means that, perhaps, while some people can direct and move the flow of information, true control over it is a thing of the past. Reflections, refractions, and distortions change the image even as it is transmitted through our personal snowglobes and into our prism minds, coming out in different directions and colors, as chaotic as they are algorithmic.
We’re all the low-information voter now.
[1] I know they’re no longer glass, usually a liquid crystal display, but they work well in this metaphor so I’m leaving them in.