… I watched a group of computer engineers hold a meeting in a drab hotel on Edgware Road, London, which discussed whether or not to introduce new internet protocols to counter hacks on western utilities such as energy systems.
For hours, they debated an anti-hacking protocol with the unwieldy name “draft-rhrd-tls-tls13-visibility-01”. Then came the moment of truth: a white-bearded engineer named Sean Turner solemnly addressed the crowd: “Please hum now if you support adoption [of this tool].”
A collective hum, like a Tibetan chant, erupted, and then Turner asked those who opposed the move to hum as well. A second — far louder — sound erupted. “So at this point there is no consensus to adopt this,” he declared. The protocol was put on ice.
This might seem odd; after all, the Internet Engineering Task Force is the group that built the internet and computer geeks appear to live in a “rational”, maths-based world. But the IETF has embraced this “fuzzy” ritual in recent years because the techies like being able to sense the mood of the entire group via humming — and get the type of multidimensional information that simple “yes-no” votes cannot reveal.
Indeed, these engineers are so attached to this ritual that they were very upset when they lost the ability to hum together during the Covid-19 lockdown — and although they tried to replicate what they liked about group humming with computer code, they realised it was impossible.
– The human factor — why data is not enough to understand the world
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