Your Network Is Disconnected

When you’re online, you meet all kinds of people. You play games with them, you LOL at their jokes, or care-emoji-hug them when they’re feeling especially sad-emoji. But within the broader context of the human past, these are brand-spanking-new ways of interacting with other members of your species. How did communication become so disembodied these days—literally separated from our human bodies? In this episode, we explore different ways that people have connected to one another over time, and investigate the historical roots of today's long-distance communication. In the process, we learn how our current ways of interacting with one another are simultaneously connected and disconnected from those who preceded us.

Learn more about this rogue, underdog, Hail Mary pass of a project at findyourselfinhistory.com !

Transcript

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YAAW Podcast | Episode 105 | Doug Sofer

Your Network Is Disconnected

©2023 Doug Sofer

Intro

•   Greetings & welcome back to this glistening new podcast about how history helps us to better comprehend the Strangeness of Now.

•   Today I want to tell you about one of my friends who I fight alongside. So let’s cut away to one of our battles—already in progress.

•   [record wipe transition noise? Xylophone glissando?]

•   [video game noises in background. Explosions but also triumphant, dramatic music in 6/8 evocative of Halo. Use some 80’s synths / sawtooths—can be just 4-8 bars repeating.]

•   MassHistoria: [narrating slowly the  message he’s is typing] Kablaminator98, this is MassHistoria. I’m approaching the enemy position. My titanium golems are tanking for my fire witches. Enemy hasn’t seen me yet.

•   MH: Oh, he wrote back: “[in radio/phone voice] Affirmative MassHistoria. My hobgob magi are casting their fog-mist spell. [play sound]

•   It’ll hide your troops so you can advance undetected. I’m at west edge of enemy base.

•   [Footsteps & heavy breathing]

•   MassHistoria: [typing] Thanks Bruh. Looks like their east wall is undefended. [louder] I’m going in. [shouting] Attack!

•   [explosions and weird fantasy screeching]

•   [spoken] Augh! Lava vortex! Enemy troops coming out now! Acid gnomes! Like a hundred of ‘em!

•   [typing] Kablaminator98! They’ve got maxed AGs. I need reinforcements now!

•   MH: [explosions over phone sound] Aw man, he says he can’t help! They dropped a Diamond Gropswappener on his hobgobs! [weird distorted monster noises plus slime sounds]

•   MH: [more war noises] Dangit! Who else is online? Wait! I see that new guy, SusVenger420! Are you there!?! Oh cool. He’s got voice chat enabled.

•   SusVenger420: [robo voice] This is SusVenger420.

•   MH: Susvenger! Help! I need reinforcements!

•   SV: [robo voice] Why pay more for gems? Visit cheatface.blackmarket for cheap premium game currencies.

•   MH: [Talking] Argh! That guy’s just a ‘bot! Who else is on now? Acid gnomes just dissolved half my ‘Lectro-snakes!

•   [dissolving & shrieking snake sounds]

•   MH: [speaking] Wait: Kablaminator just typed something! He says “Hold position MH! Just dropped my Hypno-Oysters on the Gropswappener…. [more weird scream noises & alien sucking sounds]

•   MH: Awesome! The Gropswappener’s down! He’s sending reinforcements!

•   MH: [typing] It’s a unit of sonic rhinocorn riders!

•   [Galloping noises and fantasy snorting more weird effects along with yells]

•   [More ridiculous battle noises, vibration sounds, squealing of various kinds, and then fade into silence—one final scream in distance.]

•   [pause]

•   MH [typing]: Enemy base destroyed, man. That was close. Riders got here just in time. Thanks Bruh.

•   [Transition noise back]

•   Yeah! So you can see that Kablaminator98 and I make a great team when we meet online and play this totally normal game, Fight of Factions.

•   Kablaminator98 is a good friend—a true comrade-in-virtual-arms.

•   [pause]

•   But you know, when I think about it, I don’t really know anything about this dude—how old he is, where he lives—or even if he’s a dude at all. 

•      After all, game-playing AIs are getting better these days—a lot more realistic than dumb ones like that Susvenger bot.

•   So I guess if I’m being honest, I can’t even be 100% sure that my good friend Kablaminator is even a person.

•   Or that he’s even one person; this account could be run by a team of multiple people. Or even by some nasty group of scammers somewhere that’s trying to build trust—so maybe they can call in favors someday, or fish for passwords or something.

•   [pause & then profoundly]

•   Kablaminator98 might not even be his real name.

•   [longer pause]

•   So the comradeship, the shared experience of striving for a common purpose—it all feels so real. But that experience is disembodied; we’re literally removed from our human bodies when we interact with people online.

•   [pause]

•   Come to think of it, that’s an extremely unusual experience for a human to have. And a new one too, in the big scheme of history.

•   So how ‘bout today we take a look at how people in the past used to connect to one another?

•   Sure—it might feel bewildering to realize that your social interactions are literally an out-of-body experience these days.

•   But you know it’s going to just fine: I’m a professional historian and I’m trained to assist people in situations exactly like yours.

•   My name is Doug Sofer, and I’m a weirdo—just like you.

•   [theme song]

Call for sponsors

•   Support the future existence of this podcast by going to findyourselfinhistory.com/sponsors and buy an official “Certified Historical Weirdo” 3D printed medallion!

•   Printed in the USA by a professional historian—who’s an amateur at 3D printing.

Building togetherness

·      Many of the ways we connect to others these days are new—and would be startlingly unfamiliar to most humans who ever lived on this precious blueish-greenish spheroid we call planet Earth.

·      And You Are A Weirdo [divebomb] is the name of this podcast so we’re actually in a great position to put these new ways of connecting into historical context.

·      [pause]

·      This episode: “Your Network is Disconnected”!

·      Today, our strange new technologies of connecting to one another—like through online gaming or social media—are standing in for much more tried-and-true ways of engaging.

·      Over hundreds of thousands of years of human existence, our species has come up with many different and innovative ways to build communities.

·      We are especially good at distinguishing some members as part of the ‘in’ crowd and others as ‘outsiders.’

·      How we make those distinctions comes from culture—ready-to-go symbolic connections we talked about in greater detail in Episode 2.

·      [pause]

·      How we speak, how we dress, how we pray, how we work, how we chill, and how we do a million other things—these behaviors, customs, ways of being— mark us as being part of one or more groups of people.

·      Even what we eat and drink can operate in this way.

·      Ancient Mesopotamians—folks in what’s now modern day Iraq between about 3000–2000 BCE or BC—only recognized people as insiders—as civilized—if they drank beer—

o   From a big clay pot—

o   Through a straw—

o   That might have had big chunks in it.

·      [pause]

·      Everyone else was an outsider—a barbarian.

·      In the most famous Mesopotamian story—the Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh—the wild man named Enkidu tries beer for the first time and it’s only then that he goes from being part-beastly to becoming fully human in Mesopotamian eyes.

·      [pause]

·      Across the Atlantic, the peoples of central Mexico—the most populous region in the American hemisphere prior to Columbus—identified themselves as peoples of maize— corn.

·      [pause]  

·      Literally

·      [pause]

·      Both the Aztecs and Maya held that the first humans were originally made of maize dough.

·      For instance, in the Kiché Maya people’s religious & historical chronicle known as Popol Vuh, the deities Huracán and Gucumatz provided corn to the grandmother goddess Xmucané [Sh-moo-can-AY].

·      She ground up that corn and made it into dough that she shaped into the first people in the world.

·      [pause]

·      Food and drink, then, can collectively define people. They connect us to those in our group—and separate us from others.

·      [pause]

·      Other consumables in other parts of the world serve similar social functions.

·      Take the case of the coca leaf. This ordinary looking leaf contains small quantities of the psychoactive alkaloid cocaine in it. It’s of course much more diluted than pure cocaine, but chewing the leaves has a mild stimulant effect.

·      And the folks who grew—and who continue to grow them—in and around the Andes Mountains on the continent of South America, will likely tell you that these leaves give Andean peoples more than just a quick jolt of energy.

·      One classic study by the cultural anthropologist Catherine Allen—covers this exact topic in her work among the descendants of the Incas in Peru—people who speak the Incas’ official language called Quechua.

·      Amongst the people of those communities, using the leaves is about connecting with others—forming and maintaining bonds of friendship—and of kinship.

·      The exchange of coca leaves has been traditionally used to seal contracts in this region.

·      Those kinds of contracts were especially necessary because the different peoples of the Andes spread out far and wide, at many different altitude zones in these majestic mountains.

·      The Inca Empire managed to maintain a coherent state throughout a north-to-south length of roads of well over 5,000 km—that’s way more than 3,000ish miles to the non-metrically inclined. And it lasted three centuries, from the early 1200s through the end of the 1500s—

·      It was the most geographically expansive empire in the American hemisphere prior to European arrival—and that’s still an enormous distance even by today’s standards.

·      And it was constructed not just through really advanced physical road-building—and buildings-building technologies.

·      It also emerged from what big-word-users like anthropologists call reciprocity networks.

o   In essence,  networks are agreed-upon economic and social rules designed to assure that exchanges of goods and services are of equal value—that they’re fair.

o   The Incas employed these kinds of systems to trade—fairly—over those enormous distances and into places at different elevation levels that got colder the higher you go.

o   The result was a rich, diversified economy, including but not limited to hot-climate fruits and veggies coming from low elevations.

o   From the cooler middle-heights came potatoes and corn, among other good stuff.

o   And at the chilly higher elevations you had famous  wool-coat-wearing critters such as llamas and alpacas—and fur-clad guinea pigs too—and also the conspicuously non-coat-wearing whole grain called quinoa.

·      Coca leaves helped facilitate many of these exchanges; in fact, the leaves themselves were themselves traded as a commodity from the middle-elevation zones.

·      But coca leaves were also used to seal these trade deals between these different zones.

·      So very roughly like the booze-soaked networking lunches in some sectors of the business world, chewing coca could make Inca and other Andean folks feel good and allow them to socialize with the folks they were trading with.

·      But unlike three-martini lunches, coca leaves were—and still are—much more than just a simple social lubricant in many parts of the Andes.

·      As Catherine Allen writes, Andean peoples—who have been Christians for something like five centuries now—say that La “Santísima María”—the Virgin Mary—chewed coca to ease her grief from losing her son. Coca, they say, is “Our mother’s fragrance”—a direct reference to Mary.

·      Accepting coca in exchange for taking on labor, or for other kinds of goods and services, means that you’re deeply morally—even spiritually—obligated to do what you say.

·      It’s a little like swearing on a Bible.

·      [pause]

·      And, like maize in Mexico or beer in Mesopotamia, chewing coca leaves served as—and still serves as—a symbol of what it means to be an indigenous Andean person. Chewing it in specific social contexts unites some and separates them from others.

·      Peoples of the Andes connected for centuries through this shared reverence of coca leaves. And many of their descendants continue to adhere to these traditions.

·      [pause]

·      Speaking of the Inca and their descendants, another time-honored way to build bridges between people within a society, is to literally build bridges between people in a society.

·      [pause]

·      A 2007 New York Times article describes how faculty and students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology attempted to understand—and recreate—Inca bridge-building methods.

·      It turns out that Inca suspension bridge design spanned longer stretches than European bridges at the time—some probably well over 150 feet long.

o   Roman bridges maxed out at 95 feet between supports.

·      What’s more, Inca bridges extended across dizzying heights over mountain canyons.

•   Some of these historical bridges were made from multiple fibers from cotton, various grasses, small trees, and even wool from famous wool-coat-wearing critters such as llamas and alpacas.

•   A present-day version of one of these suspension bridges made almost entirely out of grass fibers is the river-canyon-spanning Q’eswachaka bridge in Southeastern Peru.

•   The disadvantage of making a bridge out of grasses is that it biodegrades over time. For that reason the bridge brings in hundreds of people each year to rebuild it according to Inca methods.

•   On the other hand, an advantage of making a bridge out of grasses is that people can build them cheaply and quickly—it typically takes three days a year to rebuild, and without the cost overruns and kickbacks typical of some present-day infrastructure projects.

•   You know, like that huge one in your hometown that’s STILL not done.

•   And maybe most important: It’s a way to affirm the community—to connect people together.

•   Not only across the chasm over the river, but also between the hearts and minds of the people themselves.

•   There’s a great video at the website for the Smithsonian’s Museum of the American Indian. I’ll throw a link up on findyourselfinhistory.com so that you can see it. It ends with a big party.

•   [pause] So— like fighting a pretend battle in an online game, building suspension bridges brings many people together to accomplish a singular task.

•   [long pause]

•   And unlike fighting a pretend battle in that online game I waste too much time playing, they’re actually doing something useful.

•   [separator music]

Disembodied Networking

•   Up until now we’ve been talking about ways of connecting that have brought people physically together.

•   We’ve talked about corn dough, and beer, and coca leaves, and llamas, and suspension bridges—you know, the usual list.

•   All of those ways of connecting involve people being near one another in some way.

•   [pause]

•   But what if you wanted to communicate some message to someone over a long distance? My friend Kablaminator98 might be my next door neighbor—or he might be in Australia halfway around the world.

•   Communication is so quick these days, it’s hard to tell.

•   But it wasn’t always that way.

•   Prior to electricity-based communication, the fastest method of conveying a message was through air mail.

•   [pause]

•   Air mail carried by airplanes was not invented until the first two decades of the 20th century—long after electricity-based communication had already become commonplace. In fact, if we’re just talking about relaying a simple message from point A to point B, airmail via airplane was a major downgrade in terms of speed compared to the earlier telegraph tech that we’ll talk about in just a bit.

•   But there was another kind of airmail that came before both airplanes and telegraphs—long, long, before, actually.

•   This tech advance somewhat resembled airplane-based mail in that it also employed things with wings to fly messages from place to place.

•   But unlike airplanes, this older tech flew using renewable fuel sources.

•   And it was much quieter. And it had a beating heart. And feathers.

•   And it was pigeons.

•   [pause]

•   Our first record of people domesticating pigeons—also called rock doves—dates back to close to 5,000 years ago to ancient Sumer in Mesopotamia—you know, that place where they drank beer through straws.

•   Almost certainly, the first reason people had for domesticating pigeons was so they could eat them—which also means that the ancient Sumerians may have been the first civilization to invent beer and wings.

•   But they weren’t alone. The Egyptians had networks of pigeon houses that they used to send messages all over their large empire.

•   Writes the journalist Andrew Blechman in his 2006 book about pigeons—unironically entitledPigeons:

•   “Egyptians may have been the first to use pigeons as carriers when they sent birds in the four cardinal directions to announce the ascension of a new pharaoh to the throne. Likewise, messages regarding flood levels were sent up and down the Nile by means of an early pigeon post.”

•   Imperial China, Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome—and most other significantly large civilizations that once had wild pigeons living somewhere nearby—found ways to domesticate them, and learned to send messages with them.

•   Don’t underestimate these guys; they are among the world’s best navigators. You can bring them somewhere new and they’ll find their way back home. And they travel something like 60 miles-an-hour, and modern breeds can cover many, many hundreds of miles without stopping.

•   They don’t even stop flying for bathroom breaks, as anyone who has ever tried to keep their car clean knows all too well.

•   [pause]

•   Though humans first employed pigeons as postal carriers in the classical age, they were not really outdated until the invention of very reliable radio communication—in other words, for thousands and thousands of years, the humble pigeon was the fastest method by which to send messages.

•   In 1870 during the Franco-Prussian War, French troops in Paris found that pigeons were the only way to tell the rest of France that they’d been surrounded.

•   And during the First World War, a U.S. pigeon named “Cher Ami”—"little friend” in French—had its tiny little leg blown off by German small arms fire, but still somehow managed to bring its note to friendly forces:

•   It’s message was a report from the so-called U.S. “Lost Battalion,” saying that they were under fire from their own army’s artillery.

•   The gunners immediately stopped firing. this brave feathered hero saved what was left of the battalion.

•   [pause]

•   Even after the invention of reliable radios and airplanes, pigeons continued to factor into some areas of strategic military planning.

•   In 2004, an article in the Guardian newspaper from London, exposed a 1945 plan by the UK’s Royal Air Force to drop weaponized anthrax on future enemies by way of pigeon.

•   [pause]

•   Some folks may tell you that pigeons can carry disease.

•   But this is not what they usually mean.

•   [pause]

•   So up until the middle of the 19th century, if you wanted to send a fast message to someone—and you didn’t want someone to carry it for you, and you didn’t want to train a bunch of birds—your options were pretty limited.

•   Yet there were two other non-bird approaches.

•   And both were actually much faster than the fastest birds.

•   The first was simply to communicate by making [shouting] really loud sounds.

•   [pause]

•   Sounds can get muffled pretty quickly and there’s only so far it can go, but throughout history, drums and various kinds of horns—and sirens—have been used to convey certain kinds of messages to different people.

•   Hey by the way, I didn’t include my siren sound effect because if you’re behind the wheel right now the sound of a fast-approaching emergency vehicle might have distracted you.

•   Listener safety comes first on this show.

•   One typical example of a loud-sound-based signal can be found in Baron Frederick von Stueben’s Revolutionary War army drill manual.

•   This famous book brought much-needed discipline to George Washington’s unruly Continental Army and helped the U.S. win the American Revolution.

•   And it includes a section called “[QE] Of the different beats of the drum”—outlining the different messages that different kinds of drum beats would send to the Patriot soldiers.

•   These signals convey orders: to march away, to march back, to wake up, to assemble, to retreat, to return to the tents, to ready arms, and so on.

•   [pause]

•   And when it was time to call soldiers to dinner, the drummer would lay down a dope groove called the roast beef.

•   I bet that hearing that specific beat probably got the men drooling all over their nice continental army uniforms like pack of Pavlov’s dogs.

•   I’ll link to a YouTube video on findyourselfinhistory.com if you want to hear what it sounds like when a drummer lays down these serious roast-beef-beats.

•   [pause]

•   But as awesome the names of some of these sound-signals were, noises can only carry so far.

•   Instead, it was the ability to use our sense of sight—to see far-away signals—that was the best pigeon-free way to send messages over long distances.

•   [pause]

•   Of course, the problem with sight-based communication over long distances, though, is that any one person can only see so far.

•   You needed a whole network of see-ers—of peeping peeps—ready to point their pupils at each other at any given moment in time.

•   To maximize efficiency, the viewers who made up systems like these needed devices that allowed you to see further way—telescopes—whose name comes from the Greek root words meaning ‘far-away’ and ‘looking at.’

•   And getting these visual networks going required training people—who, not entirely unlike pigeons—can be notoriously difficult to train.

•   [pause]

•   Despite these logistical considerations, some folks found ways to make these kinds of systems work.

•   [pause]

•   Probably the most effective network of sight-based signaling in history—at least prior to flashing electric spotlights at one another—was a network of signaling towers developed by a French chap named Claude Chappe [spell out] who lived from 1763–1805.

•   Chappe’s towers were used during the Napoleonic wars, all the way back in 1792.

•   Each station had a signaler in it who could manipulate two large mechanical arms on top of the tower. By setting the angles of the arms to specific coded positions, you could send complex messages between them.

•   The people in the towers used telescopes to see each other’s messages while allowing as much distance as possible between each towers.

•   This network of towers spanned longer North-South and wider east-west than the borders of France itself. That’s over 600 km or 370ish miles of light-speed communication.

•   [pause]

•   Except of course it was slower in practice. Each person at each station had to be paying attention at all times. And each would have to acquire the code and pass it along manually.

•   [pause]

•   Still, it could send a signal so far that they named this system of towers after the Greek words meaning “far” and “writin’ stuff.”

•   And that word, was telegraph.

•   Did they call this France-spanning chain of bendy-arm towers by that name just to confuse future students of history like you and me?

•   [Dramatically] Nobody knows for sure.

•   But—I mean—of course not.

•   But what we do know is that the later, better-known thing called a telegraph sends electrical signals over networks of wires.

•   And by the 1840s, it brought essentially instantaneous communication to the human species for the first time in human history.

•   [separator music] 

Electric Avenues

•   I’m looking at a book printed in London, all the way back in 1823, called

•   “Descriptions of An Electrical Telegraph and of Some Other Electrical Apparatus” by an author named Francis Ronalds.

•   Ronalds, according to one UK-based engineering magazine, was:

•   “[QE] the forgotten father of the electric telegraph.”

•   The article explains that while Samuel Morse and others helped develop the telegraph and begin building its enormous, wired networks, it was Ronalds who first built a working version—two decades earlier.

•   For his part, Ronalds writes in this 1823 book that an even earlier generation of scientists:

•   “[QE]…so long ago as the year 1748, proved that electrical shocks might be conducted through long circuits with immeasurable velocity.”

•   Ronalds continues, explaining just how exciting this prospect of an electrical telegraph could be:

•   [QE] “[W]hy should not our kings hold councils at Brighton with their ministers in London?”

•   [pause]

•   Brighton is 75 miles away from London, by the way.

•   [pause]

•   He proposes building a network of 

•   “[QE] electrical conversazione offices, communicating with each other all over the kingdom…”

•   A conversazione is a fancy Italian word that’s sometimes used in English to describe a scholarly shindig where you discuss literature and other high-minded topics.

•   No one’s ever invited me to any conversazioni—so I had to look it up.

•   [pause]

•   And even though it took people a couple more decades to execute Ronalds’ vision, there is no question that the telegraph changed what had been up until the 1840s, the normal limits of communication speed for the human species.

•   By the 1870s underwater telegraph cables had stretched between Britain and India. 

•   [play “-.-- --- ..- / .- .-. . / .- / .-- . .. .-. -.. --- .-.-.-” which is “You are a weirdo.”]

•   By 1902, they literally circled the entire earth, making it possible for two people who were half a planet apart from one another to hold a disembodied chat in morse code.

•   [pause]

•   Telegraphs also changed how people connected to one another within the borders of their own countries.

•   In some ways, telegraphs even changed the concept of what a country was—and who would be part of it.

•   Take the case of Brazil.

•   As late as 1900, many of the indigenous peoples living in the enormous Amazon rain forest wanted little to do with the majority Portuguese-speaking population.

•   Given the history of European contact with indigenous American peoples, their caution was warranted.

•   But in the early 20th century, a convergence of multiple technologies, and new government policy on the part of Brazil’s republic, changed the equation.

•   Historian Todd Diacon documents these events in his 2006 book, Stringing Together A Nation.

•   It’s about how the Brazilian military attempted to erect an enormous telegraph cable line through the amazon, and to connect Amazon peoples to the rest of the country in the process.

•   This initiative was led by an important officer in the Brazilian army.

•   But it was a very unusual military operation.

•   That’s because Brazil’s policy toward its indigenous peoples was designed to be peaceful.

•   Its leader was a man named Cândido Mariano Da Silva Rondon—spelled RONDON: Brazilian Portuguese pronounces Rs at the start of words like a ‘[Braz R]-sound]: [repeat:] So “Rondon.”

•   Brazilian schoolkids to this day memorize his saying that reflected the core value of the policy toward indigenous Brazilians: “To die if necessary: To kill, never.”

•   Rondon and many of his fellow army officers belonged to what was called the Positivist Church of Brazil.

•   [pause]

•   You may have heard of positivism as a philosophy that reveres rational thought.

•   Its adherents hold that logic, reason, science and technology—are capable of answering most or all of the most questions in life—and that doing so can bring about progress—a better world.

•   But in just two countries around the world—France and Brazil—positivism became an actual, full-blown religion of reason—complete with church buildings.

•   In fact, one of th e most important positivist slogans “order and progress,” is literally written on the flag of Brazil: “ordem e progresso” in Portuguese.

•   [pause]

•   Rondon had a Positivist faith in reason itself that technological progress could bring Brazilians together as a single nation.

•   As early 20th century bulldozers cut a wide laceration through the Brazilian Amazon rainforest, Rondon’s team strung telegraph wires on to utility poles.

•   Along the way, he met many independent indigenous peoples whom he attempted to convert into Brazilians through technology.

•   For instance, he had a generator and an early movie projector with him, which he shone on the forest canopy to impress the peoples he’d run into.

•    [pause]

•   The project’s first telegraph line through the Amazon began in 1907 and took until 1916 to be completed.

•   Actual communication using the line was notoriously unreliable. Poles crumbled, station operators got sick, wires collapsed to the ground.

•   It often took many days to send a so-called instantaneous message.

•   And just a few short years later, wireless radio technology rendered the entire project irrelevant.

•   But the Rondon Commission remains famous to this day for its efforts and for Rondon’s seemingly well-intentioned attempts to connect previously disconnected peoples living within Brazil’s borders—to the rest of Brazil.

•   The project—and perhaps Rondon too—might not have always recognized the peoples they encountered as equals. Yet the whole operation was undeniably more peaceful than similar nation-building attempts in many other countries.

•   [pause]

•   On the whole, the wired tech mattered much less than the slow-moving expedition itself—the people who met one another in person.

•   In that sense, it was more like building bridges than it was about constructing a disembodied electric messaging system.

•   [pause]

•   But maybe it’s possible to do both things at the same time.

•   [pause]

•   The anthropologist Roberto J. González describes exactly this kind of hybrid approach in a 2020 book about a Mexican village called Talea.

•   Talea is an independent-spirited community located in the corner of the Mexican state of Oaxaca called Rincón—which means corner.

•   The village has a nearly five-century-long history of strong, local government and community activism.

•   The community is what Gonzalez calls “[QE] a regional trendsetter” when it comes to solving big problems throughout the broader region.

•   The problem they sought to solve in 2011 was a new one:

•   They wanted reliable cell phone service.

•   They petitioned local cell phone company but were told Talea was too remote.

•   Undeterred, though, a motley crew assembled to try to solve this problem once and for all.

•   This plucky team included not only Taleans but also an international cast of characters almost too cool to be true:

•   A Mexican lawyer with vast international experience, A U.S.-born urban planning specialist, An enigmatic computer hacker who only goes by a single name, multiple folks from non-governmental organizations operating in Oaxaca, two members of Talea’s radio station, and a whole host of community organizers, and many different municipal and rural leaders from all walks of life.

•   They were a determined, Oceans-Eleven-like group of diverse individuals who presumably frequently walked in slow motion, shoulder to shoulder towards the camera—or at least that’s how I imagine it from Rodríguez’s telling.

•   [pause]

•   After securing funding from local government to invest in their own cell phone network, they needed to assure that they had regional support in this corner of Oaxaca.

•   And they built that support the old-fashioned way: They got on to the frequently treacherous rural roads of this region and started connecting in person to nearby villages.

•   Convincing those populations to embrace the project was a challenging affair that took place not only in Spanish but in multiple indigenous Mexican languages—Zapotec, Mixtec, Mixe, and Chinantec.

•   As with any group of communities, there had been historical feuds between some of the villages that the team had to work around carefully—diplomatically.

•   And they pulled it off, convincing enough area villages to endorse the project. In 2013, the cell network powered up.

•   [power up sound effect]

•   [pause]

•   But like many political victories, it didn’t last forever.

•   A large number of technical, logistical and physical obstacles made the new network difficult to keep up, and a big telecom company eventually swooped in and offered cheaper service to area consumers and basically out-competed the home-grown network.

•   [pause]

•   Still, today Talea continues to have cell service and they definitely got it earlier than they would have without this herculean act of networking—not only in the new disembodied sense, but also through the old-school, centuries-old methods of visiting neighboring communities—sitting down, maybe having some food and drink and getting to know folks and their interests.

•   And today, in 2023, Taleans and other folks from around the world can use that network to play online videogames.

•   Who knows? Maybe my good friend Kablaminator98 hails from Talea.

•   [Separator music]

Conclusion

•   Many of the ways that we connect with each other today would seem downright alien to people of the past.

•   We’re in the middle of a worldwide experiment in connecting to each other—in ways that are fundamentally different—more disembodied—than ever before.

•   In that sense we’re oddly disconnected from our ancestors—and from some of the most reliable methods they invented for coming together.

•   Normal connections in history often took the form of sharing physical things with one another. Customs and rites of togetherness. Eating & drinking—and possible chewing stuff together.

•   We’d come closer to one another by building roads—or bridges—or organizing big community projects with a shared sense of purpose.

•   [pause]

•   Sure, for a long time we have also had ways to send messages without visiting each other directly. Whether via friendly birds, or drums, or through sending visual signs, people have created innovative ways of conveying information for millennia.

•   But those messages were generally pretty short, and only limited people—like armies—had access to some of those transmission methods.

•   And a pigeon can only carry so much information tied to its feet.

•   [pause]

•   So today we’re living in a new age of communication.

•   [pause]

•   That’s not necessarily a bad thing—I’m actually becoming pretty fond of listening to those podcast things that everyone’s talking about these days, for example.

•   [pause]

•   But history gives us a critically needed temporal perspective that’s often lacking from today’s conversations.

•   History allows us to ponder the technologies and behaviors of the present-day within the context of ages past.

•   It helps us understand what technologies are old—and fundamentally part of prior human experience—

•   And which ones represent something new.

•   And it helps us know when we’re doing something that might seem familiar, but which is actually radically disconnected—from the whole of the human experience.

Teaser/Credits/outro

·      For next time: It’s February right now. How cold is it in northern Minnesota? It’s exactly the temperature of really freaking cold. But northern Minnesotans can get into their 4-wheel drive vehicles or snowmobiles or dog sleds and mush over to their local grocery store and pick up a bunch of bananas.

·      But that situation is odd—because bananas don’t grow in cold places at all; in fact, they only grow in places that are really freaking hot.

·      Cheap access to bananas for cold-weather consumers is only recent in human history, and that makes it utterly abnormal—right up our alley.

·      Yes, you have NEW bananas. Next time.

·      [long pause]

·      You can find references to the historical sources, audio clips, and other cool stuff used for this and other episodes at findyourselfinhistory.com .

·      Thanks to my colleague Aaron Astor at Maryville College for assistance with figuring out how the heck something called “the Roast Beef” would be listed next to other drumming instructions.

·      And speaking of Maryville College: I’d like to give a special, heartfelt thanks to the good folks at my main gig: Maryville College in East Tennessee—for a sabbatical in Fall 2022 and supporting me throughout this podcast-making process.

·      Maryville College. In the Smoky Mountains. Everyday Unexpected. Check us out at maryvillecollege.edu 

·      [Fast, lawyerly] Opinions expressed in this awesome podcast are mine alone and not necessarily those of Maryville College, its administration, the board of directors, faculty, staff, students, or forest creatures in the college’s woods.

·      This podcast episode was researched, written, edited, recorded and mixed by Doug Sofer; all materials are copyright 2023 Doug Sofer. The theme song was written and performed by Doug Sofer with Matt Trimboli on rhythm guitar. You can find out more about Matt at trimboli.com .

·      Thanks for listening.