Surface tension
To 'assume' is to make "ass" an adjective for both u and me
A couple of years back, I worked on some communication material for a new type of carbon-based filter material… Doesn’t sound especially exciting I know! Like many of the innovations in the ‘materials’ space, which occur in the basement R&D labs of huge global companies, it was a side project for the company developing it but potentially significant in several beneath-the-zeitgeist ways.
I don’t need to get into the specifics of what I was working on, except to say, it required me to understand a bit more about technologies like activated charcoal and other filter materials.
You may not have put much thought into it, but this is stuff of the modern world; these materials are used in nearly every industry and throughout your home to extract pollutants, including dust, vapours, odour, bacteria, and other microscopic baddies, from water, oil, or air. Like the rest of the planet, you might even be intimately familiar with them as a result of some recent mask-wearing!
To give you an idea of the scope, the particular filter material I was working on was designed to be used in everything from odour-free sports clothing, industrial clean-rooms, museum displays, water treatment, automotive parts, cosmetics and food manufacture, widespread medical use, and many other applications.
And, as many applications as there are for this sort of thing, there are also an equally large range of materials you can build an effective filter from, depending on what you’re trying to achieve. But the principle is essentially the same across all types of filters, and mostly not well understood.
It’s all about surface area.
Essentially, the way an effective filter works is like a huge maze. You put dirty water or air in one end and millions of little dead-ends and crevices trap particles and molecules and other pollutants, allowing just clean air or water to pass through to the other end.
Because some stuff (air/water/oil) will pass through it, we tend to describe filter materials as “porous”, but that word tends to simplify the path the air, oil, or water takes through them. For example, an effective HEPA filter, filtering out things as small as a virus from the air, could be described as porous, just as a kitchen sieve that filters out golf-ball-sized potatoes from a pot of boiling water could. But the HEPA filter isn’t just made of “smaller holes”, it’s an incredibly complex three-dimensional matrix of tunnels and channels, like a huge network of microscopic caves.
One of the things that makes carbon filters, like the one I was working on, so effective is the fact that they may even feature different-sized entrances to many of those ‘dead-end’ caves, allowing them to trap particles of various microscopic sizes to filter out, for example, both bacteria and viruses, despite their potentially 10-fold size difference.
Anyway, the point I’m getting to with all this is, what makes a filter effective is how much surface area you can pack into it:
Imagine you poured some dirty water down a smooth, gently-sloping, piece of metal. As the water flows over the surface, even though the metal is smooth, some amount of resistance slows and stops the heaviest particles. So, even something as basic as a smooth piece of metal can act as a kind of filter when combined with a large surface area and a little gravity. This is essentially how a more advanced filter material differs from something as simple as a sieve.
The highly effective carbon filters have a truly staggering internal surface area. A piece of activated carbon the size of a single green pea, flattened out to reveal all its internal surfaces, could cover the same land area as perhaps four suburban family homes.
Seriously.
So, this probably feels like a pretty wide diversion from the topics I usually explore in this newsletter, but I wanted to give you that background to get you thinking about something I’m noticing a lot in politics at the moment.
At a time when we have more access to individual preferences and opinion and motivation than ever before in history, we are leaning especially hard on generalisation. Our overwhelmed brains essentially serve us a sea of ‘pea shapes’, unable to pay attention to the massive size and complexity of the surfaces inside so many forms.
This comes from a very natural human tendency towards shortcuts, but it is also a new challenge for humanity; responsible for a great deal of our conflict, and growing division.
After all, it has always been hard to understand how an apparently ‘lowly factory worker’ can support a right-wing political party that plainly wants to crush union protections, imperil the basic needs of ordinary people, and further enrich the already wealthy. Equally, you might find it hard to understand why someone in a reasonably comfortable position would support taxing comfortable people more.
But now, we are having to process those contradictions at both a scale and intimacy we’ve never faced before. We’re trying to navigate those complex individualised caverns on a Reddit or Twitter (X) thread populated by a million strangers from across cultures and demographics.
It’s just not humanly possible.
When we have been able to have human-scale discussions, I think what all the surface area adds up to—despite the vastly different twists and turns, caverns and chasms that make a person unique—is a very universal and underestimated feeling: Hope. For your future, or that of your children, or your community.
This should make us feel pretty good about ourselves. It should give us a sense of community. Even as we fight each other, the foundation on which we fight is a mutual idea that things can get better.
Sure, some of us believe that if things get better for individuals, it will add up to more dynamism and ‘trickle-down’ benefits to the masses; Some of us believe if things get better collectively, it will add up to an army of empowerment and diversity able to solve problems through brute force or cooperation; Some of us believe we already nutted out our best selves 30 or 60 or 250 years ago, and we just need to wind the clock back to that social state.
Regardless of there being different perceived paths to ‘better’, that hope is the surface on which the paths are formed. And so, in periods of our history when our networks were smaller and we were required to “pull together”, there was always an appreciation that while we are complex individually, we all filter it over a surface built on similar aspirations—more safety, comfort, respect, time.
I wonder if we’ve lost sight of the fact we all have hope. I wonder if we’re forgetting we all filter the input of our world over that surface. I think an increasingly large portion of us are so overwhelmed by our social reach that we genuinely can’t see any real detail in the ‘other’ group, just a mass “out to get us” in some destructive and nihilistic way, rather than people “out to make things better”, because we just don’t have the evolutionary bandwidth to parse that out of the new scale of our lives.
Of course, there are bad, selfish, and bigoted ideas in people. Not everything filtered through every human comes out clean, and sometimes the crevices in people turn even a hopeful path toxic. But there’s no appreciation of even that from the sort of distances and generalisations that we are increasingly fix our view of each other at now.
You might say this is not new. We’ve had political division and polarisation forever. And that’s true. But there was a time when debate served to persuade, not simply score points then drop the mic. The modern aggression through which harmless, largely disengaged, people are bundled up into tribes that don’t even begin to represent them—“woke snowflakes” or “bigotted ignoramuses”—seems like it’s gone up a notch in the years since our social reach has expanded.
There has been a great deal written about the nature of “humanity on social media”; about the costs of the anonymity, the persuasiveness of the algorithms, and the way it perversely bandages over the dearth of actual physical community. I think one of the very worst things it has done is make it a near impossibility to understand the reasons why people feel like they do.
It’s made it essential to ‘shortcut’ people.
Everything is fast and loud, curated and wide-reaching. We’ve forgotten we actually have optimism in common and, I wonder if we were do something as simple as acknowledge that, then we might find we can empathise and share other things as well.
There’s no solving this problem in a single, sparsely-read Substack, written from the far end of the world.
But, like many of the things I talk about in this substack, it is something that needs to be seen before it can be solved.
We have never had so much knowledge of so many of each other’s lives, yet so little patience to unpack it. We “share” everything straight past each other, because the reach of our influence now far exceeds the reach of an embrace. So, while we might each, individually, remain driven by hope, we are being left with only one way to express it: As a bull-horn projection clear over the top of an endless sea of, unanalysed, ‘peas’.
-T
Really enjoyed reading this one in particular