The Two Strings Theory

How Humanity's Deepest Longing And Beauty Are Hidden In Technology

Technology is advancing at an exponential rate. It's overwhelming. And while there are countless technical domains that I cannot speak about with any expertise, I can talk about one.

My domain is communication media. And it, like all the others, is advancing wildly, exponentially, and in seemingly unpredictable ways with no end imaginable.

However, what has taken me years to realize is that counter to popular assumption, there is nothing unpredictable about the progression of technical advancement in communucation media, and that the progression does indeed have an actual end-state, a technical state afterwhich no further technical development will be sought.

What honestly surprised me most of all was that this end-state revealed something core, and beautiful about humanity.

The year was 1993.

No one you know had a website.

There was no Chrome or Internet Explorer or Safari.

There wasn’t even a Netscape.

There was no Amazon, Google or Ruin-the-world... I mean Facebook.

No Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, or Lycos.

No CSS or javascript. No Hotmail, banner ads, pop ups or spam.

No one you know had an email address, nor had any of them spoken the words "Broadband" or "World Wide Web".

For all intents and purposes, as far as you or me - or maybe your parents - were concerned...

there was no Internet.

Computers were boxes - mainly isolated from one another. You had "Floppy discs" of various sizes, and there was this cool, new format called a "CD-ROM". Which basically looked like a Music CD that didn't play music files.

Oh, sorry, I always forget some of you were born like, after the Star Wars Prequel Trilogy came out and think "Episode 1" was actually episode 1.

Ok, so a "CD" was a round disc that had sort of holographic rainbows on it and played digital music. No, vinyl records were bigger, and were basically a kind of steampunk analog technology that came like 100 years before that. Yes, I know you can buy turntables today and you can't find CD players, vinyl is just an aging hipster trend. Look sorry, I can't do this for you right now ok? Just trust me and try to catch up.

Anyway-

1993 was the same year I met Tim Smith, my future business partner, and whose cockamamie idea it was to start developing interactive marketing on Floppy discs and CD-ROMs for "com-pu-ters" at a time when literally no one was buying such a thing.

Of course that turned out to be a lot less cockamamie a couple years later.

Our company was called Red Sky Interactive. Had we started in 1995 or 96 it might have been called Red Sky Dot Com, or Red Sky Online. But those terms didn’t exist yet.

The first problem back then began in getting meetings with fortune 500 companies to talk about digital marketing. That turned out to be about as easy as getting a meeting with a fortune 500 company to talk about, I don't know, poop*.

* I never actually tried to have a meeting with a fortune 500 company to talk about poop, so I'm just guessing. That said - I know some agencies who's work was *so* bad... well, later.

Anyway we did get some key meetings in those early days by going to great effort. We'd walk into these cavernous, wildly imposing, beautifully designed executive conference rooms with looong tables surrounded by plush chairs normally occupied by VERY BIG, IMPORTANT PEOPLE. And we sat in them.

In those very first days before the team grew with incredible talent, there was this nervous undercurrent that maybe Tim and I didn't belong in those big rooms, with our long hair and the kind of clothes that we could afford. But Tim was ex-Earnst & Young and a commanding, remarkably quick-thinking and compelling speaker, and I was the “artist-type” who'd perform some custom, digital-contraption-show on a not-so-portable computer we'd schlepped in (sometimes a desktop, don't ask) and I think our one-two punch universally caught people off guard.

Usually they hired us, sometimes they didn't, but invariably at some point in the meeting what they all did was ask:

"Why?"

"Why computers? I already spend Millions of dollars on Television, Print, and Radio, (me: lol "radio") why should I take my budget away from those very effective marketing platforms and spend it on something totally unproven ...on computers?"

I'll confess, the first time I heard that question I had a slight panic attack (not my last at Red Sky), I realized I didn't have a good answer, and it was a fair question. We ultimately improvised various answers to that question over the first couple meetings. It usually involved "interactivity is the future of media", "consumers can interact with your brand", "interacting is far more engaging than just viewing" or whatever. Over time we learned to pre-empt that question.

Years later the Internet came along and those VERY BIG, IMPORTANT PEOPLE suddenly stopped asking why. By then they all just wanted it and too often didn't even care why.

But it was in that gap of time between none of them seeing it - and everyone seeing it that I was haunted by the idea that there was maybe an answer to the question that would have explained - not just the benefits of digital media - but the reasons, the path, the future, everything.

Like how this all felt inevitable.

That maybe there was some fundamental law in the way media and communication technology progressed that would make things clear. Because at a gut level it felt like there should be. And it contiues to feel like that today in the domain of every advancing communication medium I can name.

I guess as it always does, that question, "why?" became a doorway, and answering it satisfactorily lead me down a years-long path, away from computers, with a few false stops along the way, finally ending in a beautifully unexpected place.

Asking all the questions

When you ask "why computers?" what you find yourself asking in short order is, "Why any technological advancement?"

In other words "Why is any technical advancement 'better' or 'righter' than what was before?"

I mean we can feel that it's an improvement, right? Often it seems obvious at first sight. At a gut level we just know "that's better!"

For example: Why was the advent of Color film better than B&W?

"Because it looks more real... and that's better". Did I guess your answer about right?

Why is mobile 'better' than a landline?

"It's more convenient, I have access to it more often."

One can go through and answer questions like these all day.

- Why is sound better than silent?

- Why is broadband better than dial up?

- Why is a 144hz display better than a 60hz display?

- Why is 600 DPI printing better than 150DPI?

- Why is 5G better than 4G?

You really don't even have to think about most of these. It seems obvious.

You might even ask questions like:

- Why would equally comfortable 3D VR be better than 2D on a screen?

- Why would a 72-hour phone battery be better than a 9-hour phone battery?

- Why would highly-articulate haptic feedback in a game be better than just 'vibrate on'?

After you've tediously asked as many of these as I have, maybe you'll see that there are really only two possible answers.

THE TWO STRINGS THEORY

Every question above, and every similar question you can devise, can be answered with one of these two statements:

Better Distribution.

or

Better Resolution.

That's it. These are the primary, primitive measurements of communication media. No other similarly core measurements of progress exist in communication media. Period.

Upon hearing that there are only TWO measurements of technical development people always try to test the statement.

“Ah ha! Faster charging!” Distribution.

“TikTok filters… Memes!” Resolution.

You cannot point to a technical development in the history of, or hypothetical future of, communication media where "why" is not answered with: "because it provides better (fill in: Distribution or Resolution)".

Further, these are not merely static categorizations of technical innovation. Every answer you gave above sits on a spectrum of relative technical quality which you labelled, better than, or worse than.

As I tried to understand the model, I began to roughly visualize two strings, a Resolution string and a Distribution string, that presumably both started at the very dawn of human communication. And at that humble starting point we will affix a label to each string: "worst of all".

These strings are then marked periodically, over time, with "better than"s as we develop new approaches, tools and technologies.

(Ok yes, a case can be made that the strings start at the dawn of life since chemicals etc. were a form of communication between cells. This whole argument still holds up. But you don't want to slog through that right? And I don't feel like writing that part right now. Another time.)

EXAMPLE

When Moving Pictures were first publicly revealed in 1895 it was a remarkable advance in Resolution. At that time the medium was B&W. It was many other things too, it was silent, it ran at an inconsistently hand-cranked 16-24 frames-per-second, and had a dregree of film grain among other visual abstractions built into the medium.

We can say those features added up to be the Resolution of film at that time.

But it was new, so Distribution was difficult. Distribution of Motion Pictures involved trucks, theaters and projectors essentially.

A film would be copied and trucked to a theater and projected. Distribution was further limited to the throughput of audience members.

But work never stops in the progress of technology.

Over time projectors motorized and were produced in large numbers. B&W movies could be seen by relatively wide audiences.

Soon COLOR film arrived on the scene. A massive leap in Resolution. By the 1930s color film techniques had been refined enough to result in a single piece of color film constructively identical to the old B&W films, so on the one hand we saw a big jump in resolution but no functional change at all in distribution - same trucks, same theaters, same projectors.

Now advance forward - it's 1939 and you are sitting in a beautiful, massive movie theater which is projecting The Wizard of Oz in glorious, immersive, high-resolution full color. Rich and detailed beyond anything you've ever seen to date.

Still from *The Wizard of Oz*, 1939. Courtesy of Warner Bros

Suddenly the world got collectively thrilled by a teeny tiny, slightly blurry, B&W image again.

How'd that happen?

It was not the image that excited us. It was the fact that moving pictures and sound could suddenly be transmitted inside our homes on a Television. A new Distribution model for moving images.

And universally humanity was willing to accept a significant hit in resolution to take advantage of this much wider and much more persistent distribution.

But work never stops in the progress of technology.

And the resolution of television leapt ahead, eventually bringing "Living Color" into the home.

Then came Cable. Distribution.

HDTV. Resolution.

Home Computer. Resolution.

The Internet. Distribution.

Mobile. Distribution.

VR. Resolution.

(Yes, I've skipped countless advances.)

Now imagine our two strings, Distribution and Resolution, weaving through time and I think you’d see a lovely interaction. With each leap forward, the strings challenge one another and give time to catch up and jump ahead. It's a dance. A game of leapfrog. Two overlapping sine waves - where every intersection, or tight alignment indicates some new unified technical state of the medium. A kind of DNA recording our technical capabilities.

It’s worth noting that it is not possible to separate these two strings in any practical sense. Like 1s and 0s. Resolution and Distribution are completely dependent on one another. One simply cannot exist without the other. Lose one and all functionality ceases.

They always move together. It's not a choice.

Which brings us to the last question: where does this end?

THE END

Sorry to tease you, but we're just getting to the good part, and don't worry - I'll show a lot of pictures in this section, kay?

Remember our continuum, our string of "better than"s? Humanity has duitifully added "better than"s one after the other since the dawn of communication. We continue today, and we can imagine adding "better than"s years into the future.

But where does "better, better, better" end?

At best. Obviously. Perfect Distribution and perfect Resolution.

That's the end.

It's maybe hard to imagine that there is such a thing. That there could be an ideal end-state in this progression of technical development.

But I believe we can specifically describe these respective ideal states. And if we can - wouldn't that be useful? If we can describe what is essentially the end of the technical journey might that not help us navigate toward it over the coming years? Might it not help us evaluate, embrace or abandon concepts and ideas as they vie for succession on the strings? I like to think so.

PERFECT DISTRIBUTION

Perfect Distribution is not hard to theorize. It's rather the easiest of the two.

I think we'd have to conclude perfect Distribution is the absolute interconnection of every sentient being, 24/7, at full resolution (to be defined).

"Absolute" is probably doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. Essentially it means persistent, simultaneous, full-band I/O with all sentient beings at once.

Which I imagine means one would lack any sense of individualism and become merely a node in a universal network of life.

The Borg Cube. Star Trek: First Contact, 1996

The borg, for all you Star Trek fans.

You might argue it sounds like a bit of a nightmare, and depending on my mood I might agree with you.

Nevertheless that’s perfect Distribution. Until we reach such a technical capability we will always see room for improvement in our technology.

PERFECT RESOLUTION

I'll be honest, when I first began this excercise I thought this was the easy one. With a career's worth of focus on imagery, simulations, and special effects, I thought I had this one in the bag day one.

Like most of us I looked at the implied trajectory. I thought of "resolution" as dots per inch, pixel density, how high the sound fidelity, how accurate the kinetics, how fast the frame rate etc.

One merely needed to look at the improvements in gaming graphics to get a visceral, clear sense of where our technologies are aimed. Right? It seemed quite obvious.

“Sprint 2 Atari” through “Forza 5” - Resolution advances dramatically in racing games

Lara Croft through the ages. A clear trajectory is on display.

Naturally this lead me to believe that "perfect resolution" would be the recreation of real-world experience. Star Trek's Holodeck, or the Matrix. When the plane of the illusion is so perfect, when our five senses are so perfectly fooled that we simply can not tell the difference between reality and the medium, surely that is "perfect Resolution".

Right? There is no more room for improvement.

I believed I had it nailed for a pretty long time. This is the knee-jerk conclusion. Seemed obvious. Elon Musk thought so.

But alas, that was not it. In fact I was WAY off.

What more is there?

Well for one thing I realized that the rote recreation of reality actually isn't the point. We don't want to recreate reality. We already have reality. Rather, the point in having the ability to recreate reality is so we can ABSTRACT the sensation of reality to suit our interests.

To do impossible things we could not otherwise do.

To go impossible places we could not otherwise go.

To be impossible things we could not otherwise be.

To gain liquid control over reality. To live an abstracted life free of the limitations of reality.

To experience non-reality, by design. To hear colors, taste music, experience anything we wish.

When we can wield the medium with such complete control over the illusion giving us the ability to abstract reality to create any experience we can imagine. Surely THAT is "perfect Resolution".

Right?

Once again I was briefly self-satisfied that I had closed the book on the topic. That I had reached the end.

And once again I discovered I was wrong. A million miles off in fact.

What more is there?!

The answer as I understand it today came almost accidentally.

It was stupid. I was doing something mindless like doing the dishes, and for some reason I'd been idly considering the word "communication" at random, like when you say a word so many times that it starts to sound strange? Some random synapse fired, and I realized that in my drive to identify resolution in terms of our perception I had somehow completely lost the entire plot. Communication. Or "camoonikashun" as it had started sounding in my head after 50 repetitions.

Communication.

These mediums I had been referencing all along were restricted to various types of representation and perception, as communication methods.

But in reality, they all function as filters, lenses, approximations of one’s full intent.

Even perfectly resolved virtual reality is just a gross abstraction when communication is one’s goal.

Communication is not merely about the representation of ideas, it is about actually understanding and being understood.

The Resolution of Understanding

Communication has come in so many forms.

Language, our first real communication medium, the one we still rely on, is in all fairness a ridiculously coarse filter through which to communicate! Why do you think people argue and disagree so often? Because language is stupidly imprecise, unwieldy and dense. That any complicated thoughts can squeeze through that gravel-filled filter is beyond me.

That hasn't stopped some of us. Poets have managed to raise the world's languages to new heights by saying so much more than the mere additive nature of the words alone. To communicate intense feelings sometimes with all the wrong words it seems. But they’ve shown the medium can be used better.

For some of us language just doesn't do.

Painters try to express themselves without words at all. "A picture is worth a thousand words". Complicated ideas can be expressed. Inner, emotional appreciation for the visual. Thought-provoking. And some painters have gone very far into abstraction to communicate what they see, think and feel. But of course there is always the problem of audience interpretation.

The Scream, Edvard Munch in 1893 and Atavistic Ruins after the Rain, Salvador Dali in 1934

Musicians use music, a kind of universal language with a direct line to emotion.

Film-makers use cinematic techniques and drama eliciting feelings from shared experience and empathy.

You grandmother may not mean to but the smell of those chocolate chip cookies baking imprinted on you and connect you still to those emotions even today. And sometimes you make them for others.

Touch may be the most powerful communication medium we have, with the worst distribution model.

We are all trying to express something inside and understand one another in various ways, with a message that today passes through representative mediums to an audience resulting in varying levels of accuracy and understanding.

Even the Holodeck or the Matrix at their best - impossible to discern from reality - is not the end-all be-all. This is merely a type of communication. The sharing of sensory illusions - just one more way to express oneself.

Not one of these - fully resolved - is perfect Resolution in the context of communication.

Perfect Resolution will be the direct transfer of thoughts, emotions and feelings in their native state.

What is a feeling?

I'm no psychologist but I think of a feeling as a tangled ball of our deepest and even superficial hopes, fears, insecurities, and wishes, mixed with memories that may reach as far back as you can remember. Ideas that define who you really are - your childhood, your parents, that terrible moment you were beat up. The time someone laughed at you, your awkward first kiss, your amazing 9th kiss, the way you wish people knew who you really were, what you really wanted. How much innocence, sincerity and love you have deep in your heart and an infinity of other unique possibilities. All are twisted up into a ball so tight that you can't possibly untangle it in the heat of the moment when you're fighting with your partner about the fact that the refrigerator door was left open again, and why the hell was it left open in the first place and...!

And we all know, in that moment, neither of you are really arguing about the refrigerator door. You're arguing about a thousand other things, everything tangled up in that ball of emotion that's inside you.

So the fight rages.

But if only...

If only in that moment, you could take that feeling you have, that ball of complicated emotion and memory, lift it out and place it gently inside your partner, in its native state... And your partner place theirs inside you.

They would feel what you feel. All of it. They would understand who you are, in the most intensely intimate way possble. They would undertand why you feel this way. What brought you here. The justice of your point of view that words can never express. Your love for them your fears, all laid bare. Because for a moment, they would be you.

And you would be them. And for a moment you two would have perfect understanding.

Perfect empathy.

That - is perfect Resolution.

Could you ever hate someone with whom you could experience this?

Could you ever imagine that you are in any way superior to another human being if you can understand each other so completely without language or filters?

Could you even think up the idea to fight, oppress or degrade?

Could we ever have a war if we could understand one another with such perfect resolution?!

No, I do not think any of that would be possible. It would make as much sense as fighting yourself. Of villifying yourself.

Indeed, I believe we would see people work together to solve one another's problems.

And I think, short of better communication, that's who we really are inside and who we really want to be.

And here is proof:

Today human beings of all kinds, universally, all over the planet, innovate, seek out, use and celebrate, every major technical advancement that we add to our collective communication media continuum.

Because we know it's "better than".

And though perhaps unacknowledged, deep down each of us knows every advance is only “better than” because it brings us one more increment closer to perfect communication; perfect understanding - completion of our gravitational, unspoken longing to join together with absolution.

From the moment we’re born, isolated within our body, separate from all others, we have felt inexorably compelled to connect. To be understood.

Interpret that need as you may, the pull of love, family, God, rejoining the spiritual source.

Amazingly, we can see how this drive is revealed through the incremental improvements and trajectory of our tools.

I don't think there is anything more beautiful or hopeful in our changing modern world than the inevitability of this conclusion; and its laying bare humanity's truest universal wish.

The Two Strings Theory: