Networks, 8,000 Year Old Words (with Bagels)
The Internet is one of the most powerful technologies ever invented.
It’s the science fiction dream of limitless information and access for millions with new kinds of economic opportunities that didn’t exist until just a few years ago.
It has connected people across the globe 24/7 almost for free - something that was impossible just a decade ago. And it has created what could be called “generational wealth” for a few.
Google is the best example of all of these trends.
Google enabled instant and free access to the world’s online information by indexing and making it searchable. It helped people search through what was a fast growing information wilderness of the open web through the creation of relevant search. It turned a mountain-sized haystack of data into a somewhat more organized library reading room.
All you had to do was type in a word and you would find recommendations sorted in order of “relevance”. Over time this would evolve based on the growth of the Internet and from everyone’s searches.
It’s not perfect. There are trade-offs in terms of privacy. And it’s not really “free” because of its advertising revenue model.
And it’s not transparent about what it delivers to users. Google’s proprietary search engine algorithms are just that - proprietary.
But for users like me it has provided enormous benefits.
I’m a “foodie” with access to a world of thousands of food choices and ideas. The Internet has connected foodies to the kitchens of the world. To paraphrase from a favorite old cartoon, “It’s mine, all mine, acres and acres of it…”
This includes one of my favorites — salmon - specifically smoked salmon, a/k/a “lox”!
When I discovered lox years ago it was a revelation — savory, salty, fish that was not really raw, not really “cooked”. My combo was a bagel, lox and some cream cheese. It wasn’t a part of my childhood and my family’s food culture but it didn’t stop me from embracing it as my own.
I was not alone either. In fact, it turns out hundreds of generations of people all over the world have experienced the same thing too for a very long time — centuries even.
What does Lox have to do with my talk about the Internet and Google?
Lox and Google have something in common: networks. Google has had one since 1998 but what about Lox?
Lox has hitchhiked with humanity on an ever growing network of travel and trade for 8,000 years. It was adopted into hundreds of food cultures and languages, some long extinct, just like I had adopted it as a “foodie”.
People speaking hundreds of different languages, from different walks of life, all had almost the same word for one specific food. Most of those languages went extinct but this was one of the words and ideas which survived for millennia. It feels good to not be alone in my love of smoked salmon. I come from a long line of Lox Lovers!
Now let’s go back in time 8,000 years via "The English Word That Hasn’t Changed in Sound or Meaning in 8,000 Years":
“There is hardly a more quintessential New York food than a lox bagel—a century-old popular appetizing store, Russ & Daughters, calls it “The Classic.”...
“Then, it meant salmon, and now it specifically means ‘smoked salmon.’ It’s really cool that that word hasn’t changed its pronunciation at all in 8,000 years and still refers to a particular fish.”
"roughly half the world’s population speaks an Indo-European language. That family includes 440 languages spoken across the globe, including English"
"Indo-European languages sprawls across Eurasia, including such different species as English and Tocharian B, an extinct language once spoken on the territory of Xinjiang in modern China. In Tocharian B, the word for “fish/salmon” is laks, similar to German lachs, and Icelandic lax"
Ideas and information all hitchhiked with humanity’s wanderings in the world. Just as we pass along information through the Internet, we passed along information along other networks too. Trading is how we did this before the Internet.
People and ideas, including new foods, were connected by travel and trade. Other examples besides lox include tea, cotton, tomato and whiskey (and coca!) — all through networks.
There are other networks too.
Kevin Simler wrote about networks in “Going Critical”. He nails the power and process of networks:
Networks rule our world.
From the chemical reaction pathways inside a cell, to the web of relationships in an ecosystem, to the trade and political networks that shape the course of history.
Or consider this very post you're reading.
You probably found it on a social network, downloaded it from a computer network, and are currently deciphering it with your neural network.
But as much as I've thought about networks over the years, I didn't appreciate (until very recently) the importance of simple diffusion.
This is our topic for today: the way things move and spread, somewhat chaotically, across a network.
Simler may or may not be a foodie or lox lover but he understands how so many different kinds of people know about it and had a word for it. He understood the “slow diffusion” — that hitchhiking of information, of words, as they were riding along with people in travel and trade for hundreds if not thousands of years.
And the network which would give birth to Google? The current network is based on far more recent work - the ARPANET in 1973.
It wasn't the internet as we know it, but without this early network, we wouldn't have what we take for granted today. The Big Stack wouldn't exist. You and I would not be connected by my words (and hopefully our mutual appreciation for good smoked salmon).
Arpanet was funded in the late 1960s by a military entity called The Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). The original purpose was to help researchers at different universities use their limited computing resources more efficiently. Part of ARPA’s reasoning was that networks like this might help maintain communications during a nuclear war. But in peacetime this network’s sharing capability took on a whole new life.
Before ARPANET, if a researcher at Harvard wanted to access a database at Stanford, they had to travel there and use it in person. ARPANET tested what was then a new communication technology known as packet-switching, which broke up data into smaller “packets”, and allowed various computers on the network to access the data.
With ARPANET researchers could “login” to another computer far away, transfer and save files on that network, and send messages (emails) from one sender to many readers. Just 20 years later the commercial Internet was born and the rest is foodie history.
I have shared an image of an actual PAPER map of the ENTIRE "internet" in 1973.
Let’s recap.
Networks brought together 8,000 year old food favorites and academic researchers funded by the U.S. Military… all so that you and I and billions of others could do so much.
Here are a few rough categories of what travels, or grows, on a network
Finance — Money, investments, trade, economic activity and/or information
Fashion — Clothing, design, materials (cotton, wool, petroleum for polyester, finished goods)
Fires — (conflict) ships, planes, satellites and now it’s computer viruses and hackers
Feelings — information, communication, sharing of cool moments, “flame wars”, trolls, etc
I don’t know if Google will last 8,000 years, it’s more like 8 to 80 years. But that’s not a bad time horizon for investors who want to hitchhike, like ancient 8000 year old words, on ever growing networks.