Bacteria are Building the Tower of Babel. We Will Smite Them.

I'm often entertained/moved/frightened by the way humanity seems to tell the same stories over and over again using whatever technology is available to us at the time. While the changes in technology make things seem new, the truth seems to be that our understanding, while getting progressively deeper and more complicated, approximates something closer to Yeats' widening gyres of history and psychology in which stories/discoveries/theories inevitably resonate over time. 

I recently had one of my more profound run-ins watching Bonnie Bassler's presentation at TED about emerging discoveries in Bacteria Communications. Bacteria, it turns out, are incredibly "social," not "asocial, reclusive organisms" like we thought.

Bassler's explanation of Bacterial Evolution begins resonating with human experience and our mythological history almost immediately. When a bacteria cell is alone, it does very little except seek out others. It lacks expression or capacity to affect much of its environment. Bassler exhibits this with a light-producing bacteria that remains dark when on its own. When in a large enough group, however, something profound happens: they react to darkness by emitting phosphorescent light. The catch is that there needs to be a critical mass of "aware" bacteria cells before this singular expression takes place. 

This started to immediately resonate with other networked behaviors for me. We've studied the psychology of crowds and mobs for a long time now, deepening our understanding of the strange things that occur when individuality is lost in group think. But in relation to the Web (our most recent storytelling technology) this started to take on additional expression levels for me. More on that later. 

How does bacteria make this transformation that seems dependent on a critical mass? According to Bessler, that required understanding how, if at all, bacteria communicate. Bessler asks: "how can bacteria tell the difference from times when they're alone and times when they're in a community and then all do something together?" Well, they discuss it, through a chemical language similar to the way hormones function. When the bacteria is alone, the molecules of communication chemicals just float away. But when there are a critical density of these molecules, the communication chemicals tell the bacteria that there are enough of each other to act in unison and complete their task in synchrony. It's their own private language for that particular strain of bacteria. It's an intra-species code. 

But what about other bacteria? Can they talk to others? Is there an inter-species code? It turns out, according to Bressler, that there's also a universal language that all bacteria understand. This is how they work together across species. And when they can do this, explains Bressler, bacteria can work together to "overcome their host." 

This is where the story begins to resonate with not only our contemporary history, but the entire mythology of human cooperation and collective aspiration, namely, the Tower of Babel (which shows up in various forms in many disparate cultures). So the Bible has an interesting historical legacy of elevating rural communities (low cell density) as upright and moral, and equating cities (high cell density) with sin and general godlessness. Think shepherds vs Sodom and Gomorra. The Old Testament god has a big problem with city folk. His goal for humanity was to spread out and populate the earth, not gather, plan and try to build the biggest damn tower the world has ever seen. That's just egotistical. And so God, coincidentally referred to in the Old Testament as "The Lord of Hosts," became aware of their desire to overcome his rule and smited their efforts:

"And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do; and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city. Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth."

The moral of this story is that as we gather in high enough densities, we begin to cooperate towards collective goals that replace a god-like figure with our own human achievements. Separate the god-complex from this equation, and you still have the collective replacing the individual. Either way, identity is both lost and gained. And this is where I made the leap to the Web. 

The Web is starting to expose a massively increased level of group think. One Tweet becomes a re-Tweet, becomes a million tweets that speak in unison and freak out corporations until they recall their orange juice packaging. Even more interesting is that none of this was possible until Twitter reached a critical mass, a high cell density, which gave us the confidence that there were enough of us to make a difference. Suddenly I'm not seeking out others to speak to while the communication chemicals float away, I'm able to sift through millions of Tweets to find the right molecules of information. It's all one big evolutionary soup of communication. Bressler calls this "census."

But we're all speaking different languages, right? Not exactly. While we use our personal languages to speak to each other locally (which could mean regionally, nationally, or among our friends spread globally) this is all being communicated in a "universal language" that looks like this at the "molecular" level: 11100010010100010001010. Mathematics is our universal, inter-species language which we're using to communicate on a massive scale in order to act in synchronicity. Think stock markets, server grids, analytics, not just Tweets, but yeah, those too. Our inter-species language is both conscious and unconscious, just like bacteria. And just as a fun anecdote, this is all done across fiber optic cables with little bleeps of light that emit our synchronistic actions, just like the phosphorescent bacteria in Bassler's presentation. But that's probably not helpful. The point is to realize that just like bacteria, we have two different languages (local and universal) and we have specific receptors for each (our localized decoded brains and our globally-translating computers) which enable us to act in both realms simultaneously with varying levels of effectiveness. 

Anyway, just to bring this all home, Bressler delivers the final blow when she explains why all this is important. It's important to understand how bacteria work together and communicate because we are in a historical battle to destroy them, or at least the ones that mess with our digestive tracks. After all, bacteria should spread out and populate, not converge in one spot and start working against us for their own egotistical reward. 

So, as Bressler puts it, in order to smite bacteria for their affront upon our desired order (or initiating pathogenetic behaviors), we could make it so that "bacteria can't talk, or can't hear, and can't count. Couldn't this be a new type of anti-biotic?" In this way we modify behaviors rather than self-select for mutations that make them resilient to our counter-attacks later on. It also makes it so that bacteria cells start to think they are perpetually alone in the universe instead of realizing the fantastic density of other-seeking cells living right next door to them in their high-rises, er, I mean, high-density environments. Damn, god really got us with that one. If he can't send us into the wilderness, he'll bring the wilderness to us. 

• 15 April 2009
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