Stream and Concent

I propose a thought experiment, comprised of the logical ends of two tendencies of being in the modern hyper-connected era, two ways of interacting with information.

Stream

Venkatesh Rao has talked a lot about, and championed, the idea of inhabiting multiple streams. In a stream, you choose what to pay attention to, you gain access by figuring what’s interesting and who to follow (potentially a substantial barrier to entry), you gain critical advantage through access to relatively raw information, and you contribute by curating and processing and passing information to your stream.

The stream is dynamic, evolving, and can lead to genuine insights, collaborations, projects, and friendships.

The stream way of being has a lot of room remaining for further development. We have already walked down a path leading from email, to Facebook, to Instagram, to Twitter, but Twitter is not as “always on” and immersed in the stream as we can get.

Pokemon Go indicates that Vernor Vinge’s Rainbow’s End scenario may be realistic. In Vinge’s novel, high school students practice the sort of stream processing that Venkat Rao has described, but on steroids. You earn your bread and butter by receiving micropayments for researching and weaving infographics (a rough summary, from memory).

That is, once AR really arrives, with some (actually successful) Google Glass-like interface, we’ll be in-the-moment connected with even more of our friends, perhaps making the sort of information/media product that Vinge envisioned.

Concent

By contrast, in Deep Work, Cal Newport advocates scheduling daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly periods of complete focus, cutting oneself off from outside communication and chores. Similarly, Tim Ferriss has advocated minimalist information diets.

Newport and Ferriss represent partial advances toward the concent way of being. Still, they compromise (i.e. live practically) with the hubbub of news.

In Anathem, Neal Stephenson describes the culmination of this tendency. His academic/mathematical monks inhabit several different orders: the Unarians, whose gates open to interact with the outside world and its news once every year; the Decenarians; the Centenarians; and the Millenarians.

Because all these orders live within the same physical complex, the group as a whole has developed strict rules (“the Discipline”) to prevent any information contamination.

Hundreders/Centenarians should not receive any news, any hint of political/cultural controversy, from the Tenners, who get updates every decade. Once per century is enough for the Hundreders! To them, political news abstracts to “it seems outside society has a new form of government.”

The concent, the ivory tower raised to near-literal heights, sharpens the idea of deep work. All information relevant on a timescale less than a year, ten years, a hundred years, a thousand years, should be eschewed.

It will distract you, contaminate your ideas, cause short-term thinking, impatience, short attention span. Time scale and information purity and attention span: these are connected.

The stream, on the other hand, says that real-time information processing leads to faster work, exposure to and creation of new ideas, allows you dynamically shape the world and its direction.

Yin or Yang?

Note that neither of these approaches entails solitude. Both are meant to involve community - other people. I think the key difference is what counts as news, what grabs your attention.

Both of these ideas appeal to me in different ways, and I’m not sure what the best concession to each is. Bryan Caplan lives in a bubble (his description), and maybe a Twitter feed composed of a select group would allow for community while lessening the irrelevant.

Maybe you read your few brilliant Twitter friends, but no magazines. Maybe you adopt one of Cal Newport’s deep work styles. Maybe the irrelevant is how you sort through the rough to find the gems, and contribute to your community.

Maybe you really can’t compromise and you need to adopt one or the other depending on goals and temperament. I don’t know.