The web before the web.

March 3, 2022 10:02 AM

The Internet Is Not as New as You Think. An interesting medium-read on how humans didn't invent telecommunications.

My favorite quote:

Perceiving through a web is simply what it is to perceive the world as a spider.

posted by signal (13 comments total)

From the article:

In the middle of the 19th century, a French anarchist and con man by the name of Jules Allix managed to convince at least a handful of Parisians that he had invented a “snail telegraph”—that is, a device that would communicate with another paired device at a great distance, thanks to the power of what Allix called “escargotic commotion.” The idea was simple, if completely fabricated. Based on the widely popular theory of animal magnetism proposed by Franz Mesmer at the end of the 18th century, Allix claimed that snails are particularly well suited to communicate by a magnetism-like force through the ambient medium. Once two snails have copulated with one another, he maintained, they are forever bound to each other by this force, and any change brought about in one of them immediately brings about a corresponding change in the other: an action at a distance.

Escargotic commotion!
posted by Gerald Bostock at 10:42 AM on March 3, 2022 [11 favorites]

snails are particularly well suited to communicate by a magnetism-like force through the ambient medium

Answer: When sub-atomik particules behave as snails.
*ding*
Gerald.

"What is quantum entanglement?" Allix.
posted by otherchaz at 11:19 AM on March 3, 2022 [2 favorites]

Changing the name of my wifi router from "ansible" to "escargotic commotion"...
posted by straight at 11:58 AM on March 3, 2022 [2 favorites]

Escargotic commotion!

Huh, I've been reading through the manga One Piece and they communicate through snails like this. In the question corners at the end of volumes he says that he's done historical research for characters and settings in the series; I wonder if his snail communicators are based on this.
posted by star gentle uterus at 11:58 AM on March 3, 2022 [1 favorite]

Post needs the "snailmail" tag.
posted by straight at 12:02 PM on March 3, 2022 [7 favorites]

Wait, my mistake. "Escargotic commotion" is how it works; the actual router needs to be labeled "pasilalinic-sympathetic compass."

(Please pardon me for snailjacking your post, signal. There's lots of other interesting stuff in the main link as well.)
posted by straight at 12:07 PM on March 3, 2022 [1 favorite]

Snailphones are FPP worthy. The con artist mentioned was involved in the Paris Commune. The wikipedia article on the 26 pairs of zinc bowls linked by copper-sulfate soaked fabric strips, linked above says that a different con man convinced con man #2. Intriguing.
posted by shenkerism at 12:40 PM on March 3, 2022 [1 favorite]

Once two snails have copulated with one another, he maintained, they are forever bound to each other by this force, and any change brought about in one of them immediately brings about a corresponding change in the other: an action at a distance.

This is effected, of course, by means of the love dart - bluetooth devices before bluetooth devices
posted by trig at 1:24 PM on March 3, 2022

For those with the time to read it, the actual article has a lot more to offer than just snails. I like this:

If we were not so attached to the idea that human creations are of an ontologically different character than everything else in nature—that, in other words, human creations are not really in nature at all, but extracted out of nature and then set apart from it—we might be in a better position to see human artifice, including both the mass-scale architecture of our cities and the fine and intricate assembly of our technologies, as a properly natural outgrowth of our species-specific activity. It is not that there are cities and smartphones wherever there are human beings, but cities and smartphones themselves are only the concretions of a certain kind of natural activity in which human beings have been engaging all along.

posted by signal at 1:33 PM on March 3, 2022 [6 favorites]

I couldn't help but look, and found an earlier article with more about the snails -from the same author!
posted by Miss Cellania at 4:45 PM on March 3, 2022 [2 favorites]

Brilliantly stated, and seems eminently obvious but not often enough discussed - we harnessed technology as a means of forcing it to do what we already wanted to do and already had a construct or schema for doing.
posted by Miko at 5:51 PM on March 3, 2022

A different European philosopher thought that our species-specific activity as human beings is to produce our own existence freely and purposively, so that we stand apart from what we produce in a way that the spider doesn't stand apart from its web. I'm not sure I agree, but I wonder if that line of thinking is more promising than the artificial/natural distinction J. E. H. Smith is calling into question here. I also feel like naturalizing the internet kind of elides all the social and economic and political and technological forces that gave it its specific form, even if its existence is an "excrescence" (great word!) of natural human activity.

Anyway, very interesting article, thanks for sharing it!
posted by Gerald Bostock at 12:04 AM on March 4, 2022 [2 favorites]

MetaFilter: a lot more to offer than just snails
posted by chavenet at 1:13 AM on March 4, 2022