The Language of the Angels
On Psycholinguistic Techno-Social Compaction
What is the difference between speaking and grunting?
In a word: resolution. A grunt is a vocalization which contains very little information.
“Uuugh!” can mean any number of things, including, but not limited to:
Come here
Go away
This is good
This is bad
Yes
No
Paradoxically, in and of itself, the grunt is almost infinitely abstract. Tonality, expression, body language, gestures and the environment must all be incorporated into nonverbal communication to subtractively add meaning to the utterance.
To our pre-linguistic ancestors, meaning was diffuse. To communicate, a constellation in space and time spanning multiple information channels had to be weaved.
If you’ve ever played charades or spoken to somebody who doesn’t understand your language, you’ll know exactly what this looks like; a feeble chain of weak signals crudely strung together to pass a penny of thought from one mind to another.
Nothing can be said, only bluntly suggested.
The word — the technical grunt — is able to “fold up” this same information into efficient vocal hieroglyphics through a process I call compaction.
I didn’t want to call it that. It’s Zell’s word. It was neither pretentious nor abstruse enough for me.
“How about you just trust me and look up the etymology?“ she said.
Grudgingly, I did.
Compaction, curiously, means to make a covenant. Com- means “with” (companion, community) and pact of course, still means “bargain” or “agreement.”
Compaction also happens psychically. In this case, personality complexifies over time by modelling the social environment. Individuals form internal representations of their community in order to navigate it. These autonomous representations are then gradually integrated into a more sophisticated conscious personality.
It also happens technologically. The city, for instance — the original “central processing unit” — was compacted into the circuit board. The same process causes computers to get smaller and more powerful over time, but it began before the computer even existed.
These are multiple facets of a unified techno-social psycholinguistic process which drives the evolution of human culture and civilization.
Compaction is a kind of distillation by gyrification. Folding, coiling and winding, shrinking the distances between nodes. The internet for instance networks all the computers in the world. The processes facilitated by this network then drive the compaction of the network itself.
Since shrinking the distances between servers would defeat the internet’s purpose, compaction occurs by increasing bitrates — shrinking time instead of space. From the perspective of relativity, the same thing is being shrunk in either case.
This same thing happens technologically, socially and neurologically — even biologically across a long enough period.
A single word is equivalent to a “sentence” of grunts and gestures. You can’t grunt “photosynthesis.” You would have to find some way to communicate “plant,” then “sun” and then “food,” at the bare minimum.
In morse code, likewise, each letter is its own little “sentence.” Digital information, which at the most basic level consists of ones and zeros, works the same way.
The bit is to the byte as the grunt to the word.
The word sentence is related to the word sentient, coming from the root sentio which means “to sense” and so is connected to the idea of “making sense” (literally: creating perceptions).
Linguistic representational space is more compacted than pre-verbal representational space. The information channel is wider.
When representational space expands, representational time contracts. Hence the title of the post that first described constellation: Here Time Becomes Space.
The process of compaction is necessarily hastening the approach of the eschaton, as it accelerates all other teleological processes.