When I was about 19 years old, I read Ken Keyes Jr.’s The Hundredth Monkey. The story gave me hope. It gave me the notion that if I worked hard enough, I could eventually find the hundredth monkey, that would tip human consciousness, to understanding of severity of nuclear arms proliferation. I talked to everyone. I wanted to teach the 100th Monkey.
The urban myth is simple. Scientists studying monkeys on a remote pacific island dropped sweet potatoes off trees. The monkeys liked the potatoes but didn’t like the dirt and sand that would stick to it. One 18 month old realized that she could rinse the potatoes in a nearby river. Over the course of several months, she taught the trick to her mom and some playmates. For the next 4 years, only the young monkeys and their parents learned the trick. The rest kept eating with the dirt and sand. After many more months, about 99 monkeys (of several hundred) on the island had learned the trick. What supposedly happens next is the kind of extraordinary drama that exists in remarkable stories like these. One night, the 100th Money figures it out. Overnight, the entire colony was rinsing the sweet potatoes. The phenomenon, according to the myth, was that at a certain point, when a critical number reached awareness, the new understanding would immediately transfer from mind to mind.
To make the story more exciting, on other remote islands, on the opposite end of the world (of course) thousands of miles away (of course) of a similar Family or Genus (of course) other colonies of monkeys, plagued with the same crisis that hobbled their distant relatives, learned the rinsing trick almost immediately.
Ok. I have read enough about this from various sources that this is a myth. It never really happened. But, to me, it’s always been a believable myth. Not in the same category of Icarus and Daedalus. It’s been a myth that I have always operated on.
The myth, in fact, has materialized in many ways on the internet. Once a critical mass of users begin to adopt a new technology or web service, it begins to spread organically, virally, wildly. We’ve seen this through sites like wikipedia, google, wordpress, facebook, linkedin, etc.
Originally, I wanted to call the site the hundrethmonkey, or something closely related. Then I stumbled across the term “meme” which succintly an idea that gets transferred from one mind to another through various means including imitable phenomena. You can read more about it, if you care, on Wikipedia.
Like so many others, I dream that my internet webservice idea – wattmonkey – will positively infect the minds of millions, and at a certain point, usage will increase exponentially, even factorially, up to a certain point, where it will level off.
I like the idea of 100th Monkey. I like the idea of memesism. I do beleive that at a certain point, a certain critical mass, and idea transforms to something that is accepted by a few, to something that is accepted by everyone.
It happened with our perception of the geometry of the earth, the understanding of the earth’s path around the sun, the acceptance of gravity, the awareness of our solar system, the evidence that smoking was bad, the reality that the planet was warming, and so many more instances in history.
Maybe it’s not a phenomena as much as it is credible, verifiable and generally accepted scientific proof. Although, it does take about 100 (or 1000) scientific monkeys, to substantiate these things. Then usually, unless your the society is bogged down in a neo-conservative, ideological, backward thinking conceptual framework, folks learn to accept what is real.
