Latency
Words are a lossy medium for a liquid unconscious. An idea must break through the unconscious into consciousness. And then it must become an understanding that can emerge as words.
The faster you can make an idea explicit, the faster you can act on it. The faster you can communicate issues, the faster you can solve them. The speed of your positive feedback loops is constrained by your latency.
Reducing latency means step changes in possibility. It’s literally good design (reducing the number of steps it takes an individual to accomplish a goal). It’s like when internet speeds increased drastically. Each speed-up meant new creation that wasn’t possible before. This is of course also true of the speed of intelligence.
When you develop a shared context with someone - shared experiences, shared references, you can communicate sentences in a glance, essays in single phrase metaphors. This means you can blitz ideas back and forth. You can close the loop between inspiration and manifestation faster.
Latency isn’t always a bad thing. Writing a letter means thoughtfulness, intentionality. You can’t edit a letter. It’s got a certain preciousness. A la contrast creating understanding though, it’s made me realize how efficient of a compression audio waves are. I mean take a song. A 3 minute piece of soul. What other medium can communicate a whole story of being, the visceralness of a deep emotion, the inside of a mind, more efficiently?
This makes me think that clarity of thought and deep emotional self-awarness are the main inputs to reducing individual latency. And once you’ve reduced your own latency, you can reduce your latency with the rest of the world. All communication problems are instances of high latency: insufficient self-understanding, missing context. Somewhere a wire is frayed and a few bits are making their way through but not all of them.
It’s like when I was reading Hugo Ball’s Dada Manifesto, and it was cool, but once I realized it was a sound poem meant to be heard, I realized it’s really meant to be heard. The amount of understanding that gets lost in a transcription - his voice is clear, tonal, sarcastic, emphatic, he’s communicating the absurd. I didn’t realize we could just communicate with voices from a century ago like that.
When you start occupying lower latency spaces, you acutely notice the lagginess of higher latency spaces and wonder how could I have ever lived like this? Just a taste of what low latency looks like expands your horizon of what’s possible.