Ev BogueIn San Francisco there is a coffee roasting company, Blue Bottle. Their coffee is expensive, the time between ordering and drinking is expansive.
If you're in a rush, you don't go to Blue Bottle.
The tradeoff is that you are guaranteed to enjoy every sip of your coffee. Every step along the line, in the very real architecture of this coffee, there is quality control.
Blue Bottle will never taste like Dunkin' Donuts.
After you've tasted Blue Bottle, you can only drink Blue Bottle or similar. Other coffee tastes like puke.
Quality on the Internet has the same directionality. Everyone begins by drinking Starbucks, but over time and exposure they realize that there is an unexpected depth to their world to which they were previously unaware.
Once you experience depth, surface no longer has the same appeal.
Informational evolution looks like this.
Surface -> Noise -> Depth
Surface is what you see on the televisions. Most people with TVs are caught checking the 10pm news. This understanding of the world is simplified for the lowest common denominator, resulting in an experience of the world which has very little nuance.
Most people are on the surface.
Noise is what you get caught up in when you're endlessly clicking around in a disinterested/distracted way. Facebook is a surface that promotes building, maintaining, and exploring noise. Many blogs make a business out of promoting/encouraging you to consume/create noise.
A crowd of people push through to the noise.
Depth is what is underneath the noise, in the farthest reaches of the Internet. Sometimes depth is so elusive that it can only be found in the spaces in-between the tweets, blog posts, instagr.ams and videos.
Only a few gain access to the depths.
Hold on a second, information in-between tweets?
I'll explain.
As I was meeting cyborgs during the research of Augmented Humanity, a pattern became clear: almost everyone with a knowledge of advanced cybernetics doesn't actually read blogs -- instead they use blogs as a guide for something much deeper.
Augmented humanity's filters are set too high. Blogs are noise for them and I.
In fact, most of augmented humanity doesn't spend endless hours surfing the Net at all. They've transcended the browser-based experience of the world.
There is a data eco-system, it goes something like this:
Downgrade -> Distract -> Upgrade
In the aforementioned systems, surface data will usually downgrade your knowledge of the world. TV news makes you terrified. Distracting information on Facebook merely wastes your time. You get a little, you lose a little.
Finally there is information that upgrades you. Reading What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly, for me, was a huge informational upgrade. A book I recently read by Alan Watts had the same upgrading effect for me.
Reading intelligent blogs -- for me these are consistently J.'s or G.B.'s -- will upgrade you. Why are these two blogs consistently HD? Because the authors base the writing on the secret sauce that I'll reveal in just a few lines.
When your informational experience transforms from interested to boring, it's because the data transfer upgraded you past it. Then it's your job to find the next highest data-transfer location.
What I discovered is that the highest level of data isn't out on the Net at all. Data doesn't come from blogging, tweeting, or watching videos.
Instead, it comes from a place we've all had access to for a very long time.
The biggest data upgrade you can receive is sitting down, face to face, drinking tea.
F2F (face-to-face) is the highest level data transfer.
The most successful people online, aren't getting their information online at all.
Those who delve deepest are the ones who harness the Internet to meet in RL.
These are data transfers from the heart.