About a year ago, I wrote this:
Our attention, which is more precious than gold, and the one thing we must master if we are to have any hope at all of inner development, is increasingly spent in a virtual world created, manipulated, and harvested by a few increasingly powerful companies. (Note that we “pay’ attention, a usage that captures quite precisely the crucial fact that attention is a finite and valuable resource.) Our words, our wishes, our habits, our movements, are noticed, tracked, sifted, and analyzed ”” and remembered. (If you have a Google account, try going to https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity on a logged-in browser.) Meanwhile the human world, once so vast and cool, has now been compressed into a tiny hot space in which everything is brought into immediate contact with everything else. As I wrote in the essay linked just above:
In short, the smaller and hotter the world is ”” in other words, the more likely it becomes that any two “particles’ will impinge on each other in a given time ”” the more volatile, reactive, unstable, and “twitchy’ it becomes. As volatility and the rate of change increase, it becomes more and more difficult for systems and institutions that operate at a constant pace ”” the legislative processes of large democracies, for example ”” to respond effectively to innovations and crises.
As we adjust to this accelerating impingement, our attention, constantly interrupted and diverted, becomes harder and harder for us to control, even as we become more and more deeply addicted to being peppered with (mostly useless) information. To lose one’s smart-phone ”” in other words, to lose a thing that never existed in all of human history until just over a decade ago ”” is now a crisis requiring immediate action. Imagine really cutting yourself off: no cell-phone, no Google, no Amazon, no YouTube, no Facebook, no Twitter, no email, no texting, no Google Maps, no Wikipedia. Just a land-line, the radio, basic TV, and books. (Just like it was until I was in my forties.) Could you do it?
Let’s put it this way: whether you think you can or not, I bet you won’t. I bet I won’t either.
Something very big is happening to us, and it’s happening very quickly.
Here’s another quote, if I may, from that original (2013) essay about the relation of the human world to the ideal-gas laws. (In this model, the “particles” of the contained system are individual human beings, but the principle applies also to organizations functioning as individuals.)
In short, the smaller and hotter the world is ”” in other words, the more likely it becomes that any two “particles’ will impinge on each other in a given time ”” the more volatile, reactive, unstable, and “twitchy’ it becomes. As volatility and the rate of change increase, it becomes more and more difficult for systems and institutions that operate at a constant pace ”” the legislative processes of large democracies, for example ”” to respond effectively to innovations and crises.
At the same time, however, the shrinking distance between any two points in the world-network makes it possible for governments to monitor people and events, and to exert sovereign power, with an immediacy and granularity that is without historical precedent.
In short, the communication infrastructure, by bringing every human particle into immediate contact with every other, has shrunk the size of humanity’s “container” (and therefore the average distance between any two individual human “particles”) almost to zero — a shocking alteration of the human environment that has happened, on a historical scale, in almost no time at all. This has caused a sudden and tremendous increase in temperature and pressure, in just the same way that an internal-combustion engine compresses the fuel-air mixture to make it more explosive. In this new regime of constant and energetic impingement, it is much harder for stable structures to form, or for existing ones to endure, because they are battered into pieces at once by high-energy collisions. Moreover, it is in the nature of this human system immediately to focus attention on anything that suddenly comes into existence, which rapidly increases the rate of impingement high above the background level. Anything that sticks up, however briefly, is subjected at once to tremendous and energetic pressure, often before it even becomes stable.
What has become clearer to me in the five years since writing that post is that a special place in this system is occupied by the substrate itself: the medium that makes this immediate connectivity, and the resulting shrinkage of the world, possible in the first place. This substrate consists, in part, of our transportation infrastructure of highways, ships, and airlines, but all of those are still limited by the physical size of the world, and by all the burdens and encumbrances of matter. What has really been responsible for this “phase transition” in human existence is the Internet. And this means that those who control the Internet, especially the social media that bring everyone into direct contact with everyone else every minute of the day, have a tremendous new power — comparable to, but in my view exceeding, the control of the seas, or of the press, or of the railroads, wielded by the states and empires and corporations of the past. Those who administer these electronic media effectively control not only the size of the world, but who may live in it: both by the power to exile, and the power to destroy. In this they have emerged as a new order of sovereigns, with capabilities that seem increasingly greater than any government. As private entities, they also respect no borders or constitutional limitations.
What has this new regime created for us? A hot, collapsed world that lives always at the edge of “critical mass” — where every particle is in such close proximity to every other as to create a continuous storm of explosive chain reactions. Touch the network anywhere, and the whole thing twitches, bounces, and ripples; every microphone is open all the time, at full gain, with the system always at the edge of shrieking, destructive feedback. Moreover, these resonances, bouncing around the system, create ever-changing points of additive focus, where energy from every angle is suddenly and locally concentrated. To be caught in one of these foci can mean immediate destruction. It is increasingly within the power of those operating the system to starve, or incinerate, individual particles as they see fit.
Writing at Kakistocracy, here’s Porter:
I hope you won’t think me anything less than a grinning optimist if I were to opine that the path from corporate censorship to corporate oppression is practically frictionless. Social media, Internet infrastructure, and now even payment processors have raised their red flags in a coordinated assault. It’s been quite a demonstration of malice. And I suspect it’s one that’s barely even begun.
…The keystone to all of this is a registry, or an E-Verify on Legacy Americans. I presume this will be called a Hate-List, or Justice-Sheet, or Nazi-Latte, or whatever the most actresses demand. The intent being to maintain a list of untouchables. This will assuredly be managed by one or both the SPLC and ADL. And once they secure IP addresses of hate-speakers from Internet providers, an amply-populated catalogue will be available for broad corporate resolution.
…Obviously such a liberal utopia places power beyond the President in the hands of unelected, intensely hostile (and ethnically homogenous) List administrators. This is, of course, the entire purpose of being one. Such clawed-creatures will rapidly become the most feared in the country. Though frequently fear may be allayed through generous financial contributions.
But for those less generously inclined toward mortal enemies, life can be made quite difficult indeed. This as avenues for earning or enjoying a living become tightly constricted. And those who presume their children won’t suffer from taint will be highly disappointed. Why should our University accept the son of a registered hater when there are so many qualified foreign applicants?
…And if you don’t like what corporations are doing to you then just build your own Internet backbone, data centers, payment rails, and global logistics chain. I mean did it stop Sergey Brin, Jack Dorsey, or Jeff Bezos when they were denied income sources, commercial outlets, and marketing platforms?
You will by now have noticed that this post is 100% description and 0% prescription. Short of a Butlerian Jihad — which may come, but it’s hard to see it happening anytime soon — it’s hard to see anything but acceleration ahead, into a future that, as I noted here, we’ve chosen without any serious consideration at all.