Maybe so.

Here’s my experience with recipes. My old aunt had a special recipe for a pie that make its own crust. I got the recipe and used it for some time, and then I lost it in a disk crash. I was sure I had it backed up on multiple floppies….

So I looked on the internet. And quickly I found a crustless cocoanut pie, a crustless chess pie, and a crustless sweet potato pie. Two of them had the label “Mother’s Day Pie”. When I looked for Mother’s Day Pie I found hundreds of copies of the exact same recipe with no variations. It was just like the way I remembered my aunt’s recipe, I didn’t notice any variation.

I think maybe thousands or millions of families had a secret family recipe that turned out to be just like all the others.

Will it be like that all over?

I have every reason to think some sort of special changes will come from the net, but the particular examples I’ve heard about are none of them very plausible. The special changes will probably be things we don’t much predict ahead of time.

It won’t be a Utopia; it will be a bigger world with many more possibilities. Among those possibilities will be the reordering and refinement of practical and philosophical studies of human society.

You can snark all you like, Herr Engels. There were snarkmeisters ridiculing Gutenberg for trying to sell cheap paper books when everyone knew that a real book was handwritten on parchment. Special ridicule was reserved for those who predicted that important social changes would result from pressing ink on paper with movable type.

Snark. Please don’t tell me there’s no market for it in the coming techno-utopia…

One of the factors mitigating the ghettoized state of American discourse has been the influx of immigrants, legal and illegal, over the past generation. That’s why I don’t get involved with that argument one way or the other. Both sides make short sighted and self-interested defenses of their positions, but social globalization will continue to help the US ride out recent (self-induced) storms. Henry Farrell is an immigrant, and even with his Americanized sensibility he’s still a European. As I said Farrell, along with Josh Marshall and Barack Obama is the new middle. The most annoying thing to me is the argument from self-invention: as if any of them came up with any of this themselves. It’s all pretty much predictable. I’m grateful GWB hasn’t blown us up but other than that there’ve been no surprises.

My general point is the same: being a schoolmaster without an imagination is not very useful. Having a degree in symbolic manipulation means nothing if the relations of symbol to object and event keep changing. The model of the intellectual as auto mechanic is seen now more than at any time in the last century, as absurd. The academy lags.

I’d also say that being able to play chess or exchange recipes over the internet with someone in Tashkent or Cartagena is better I think, than being able to join them in imagined virtual worlds, or even than the ability to discuss politics. The former is grounded in this world, without being freighted with it, and that argues for it being another factor mitigating against societal atomization. That’s a longer argument though.

In the Internet age, nobody has to be isolated any more. There is an infinite number of possible affinity groups, and they are all just a few clicks away from realization. It took millenia for the conventions and protocols of face-to-face introductions of strangers and granting of trust to become established. We don’t think of a letter of introduction as technology, but it is was an important invention that facilitates the transfer of trust. Similar structures will evolve rapidly on the Internet, because everything happens faster in this domain.

The Internet will not be dismissed as a fad or pigeon-holed as a peripheral technology. It is a container paradigm that will shape many social phenomena and institutions that we have long considered unalterable. A new kind of social science will arise based on the study of knowledge physics on the Internet. Watch and learn.

I kind of hope you’re right.

However, most people mostly care about the people they know personally. A few of us are now inventing new communities with like-minded people around the world who happen to speak the same dialect of the same language and who want the same sort of interactions. How much will that matter?

I see it with my wife’s games. A small number of people all over the world are playing the same text-based fantasy games. They do a lot of roleplaying. They cyber. Occasionally a young woman will wind up taking flights through the USA, canada, australia, britain, and maybe korea visiting the various young men who are infatuated with her. Eight a dozen of them have gotten pregnant and six are married. Sometimes it’s the guys who travel. So anyway, my wife spends two or three hours a day at her keyboard pretending she’s a headcount in republican rome, or a student at Miskatonic university. It makes some sort of difference in her life. She interacts with perhaps a hundred people she otherwise would have no contact with.

At first thought it all looks trivial. But after extended talks with the canadians online my wife has decided she wants to immigrate to canada. And they tell her it’s easy. All we have to do is agree to take our skills to some part of canada that nobody wants to live and apply them there, and we can be canadians!

And yet as travel gets more expensive I expect people will spend more of their attention on people they can actually be with. Suppose that in 1800 butchers in london could get almost-immediate communication with butchers in calcutta, or for that matter anyone in calcutta that wanted to talk to them. Would it have made much difference? What would they have to say to each other?

People talked about the tremendous difference the iraqi bloggers would make. I don’t see that they made any difference at all, except to themselves. As it turned out, an iraqi blogger who said what americans wanted to hear could easily get $300/month for doing it—a better than average income for rather little work. A number of them parleyed that into a ticket out of the country.

For 5 years the main effect of iraqi bloggers has been that americans who care about that sort of thing have found iraqis who tell them whatever it is they want to hear, and those americans have mostly ignored the iraqis who say things they don’t want to hear. People who’re against the war and listen to iraqis, listen to iraqis who say things are terrible. People who’re for the war and listen to iraqis, listen to iraqis who say things aren’t that bad and getting better. The net result of 5 years of iraqi blogging is a few opportunities for iraqi bloggers who picked the profitable side.

Remote from Fusion’s origin,
He lived unguessed and unawares
With all his antikith and kin,
And kept macassars on his chairs.

One morning, idling by the sea,
He spied a tin of monstrous girth
That bore three letters: A. E. C.
Out stepped a visitor from Earth.

Then, shouting gladly o’er the sands,
Met two who in their alien ways
Were like as lentils. Their right hands
Clasped, and the rest was gamma rays.”

At least Seth is imaginative. What do you have to offer, Herr Engels?

The idea that you can troll many pallid online discussions posing as multiple other people will seem generally useless. Whatever for? If you could present multiple identities to people who were available for anonymous sex, that would be somewhat different….

And who will believe rumors started by people they don’t trust? The big gain will be in an increased ability to anonymously send people things they can check themselves. That’s a plus but not a great big one.”

I don’t think you are extrapolating well. We are just at the beginning of a new era of exploration, innovation, and collective evolution of new ways of interacting with each other. Expectnig things to “settle down” is myopic. This isn’t going to settle down. If anything, the tempo of digital life will increase, because petroleum depletion will cut down travel options significantly.

The density and velocity of human communication is increasing dramatically. This will bring significant social change, just as it did in the time of Gutenberg. The fact that I can usefully apply terms from physics to the domain of Internet knowledge propagation shows that a new kind of social science is being born.

I believe that last one will seem strictly limited once people settle down.

The idea that you can troll many pallid online discussions posing as multiple other people will seem generally useless. Whatever for? If you could present multiple identities to people who were available for anonymous sex, that would be somewhat different….

And who will believe rumors started by people they don’t trust? The big gain will be in an increased ability to anonymously send people things they can check themselves. That’s a plus but not a great big one.

D^2

You may be interested in this new book, Doubt is Their Product, authored by David Michaels.

This is an excellent question, and I think it gets at why many of the superb minds on this blog bristle at the notion of technologically mediated radical social transformation.

It is nothing less than heroic intellectuallism that may be an endangered species in digital society. The notion of ego-less philosophy is anathema to the polymaths, prodigies, savants, and assorted hep-cats who dominate university facuties and academic conferences. Most existing schools of philosophy are organized around the works of “greats.” Any historical trend that disperses intellectual greatness into a cloud is viewed with suspicion by most existing or wannabe greats.

But the rise of networked society poses just such a threat. It blows away the geographically chartered university and replaces it with domain based global faculties. It levels the field for study and contribution in any specialty and tears down barriers to entry. These changes will not be welcomed by contented intellectual franchise holders in conventional institutions.

To be sure, there have always been stray high-energy particles in the intellectual world, like Buckminster Fuller or Stephen Wolfram, but these “cranks” have been relegated to the periphery. What is about to happen is the release of an enormous cognitive surplus of untapped energy as anyone with half a clue finds a means of expressing ideas on subjects of interest. Most of this will be dross, but some of it will rival the best work of the old order.

So my answer is I don’t know how free digital society will be in a conventional political sense, but I believe it will exhibit degrees of freedom and possibility that we have never known before, such as the ability of an individual to live many concurrent identities. As the minds of the world begin to link up in a Teilhardian superorganism, all sorts of phenomena will emerge. The intellectual world will likely divide into groups that welcome and resist this change. It has ever been thus.

Thanks Matt.