In response to my post yesterday a reader sent me a link to a highly thought-provoking article, Social Singularity, which presented a very optimistic view of the currently evolving discontinuity known as the internet. Warren "Bones" Bonesteel, an author and researcher, Sgt USMC 1976-1983, approaches the internet aspect of the technological singularity from a very different place than I do, but his article is instructive:
Currently there are more than one billion people on the internet. Some scholars and researchers claim that the next five years will see at least another one billion people join us. That latter number does not take into account internet capable iPods and cell phones, etc., which are projected to become even more available and ubiquitous over the next few years. In America alone, there are currently two hundred and eleven million people on the internet. More than seventy percent of them get some or all of their news and info from the WWW. The People are now beginning to flex their new-found muscles and take over the aggregation and implementation of memes and narratives that have traditionally been handled by other institutions. [Emphasis mine-SW]
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The media, our cultural and social institutions, the powerbrokers and politicians no longer control the memes and narratives of our society. The changes that we are going to see will be deep and profound. I have had a very positive feeling about the future since I - finally - understood what I was seeing. What is happening won't end in Xanadu or Utopia, but, in time, it should result in much better scenarios than we presently face as a world culture and society.
One point one billion People around the world are on the internet, with another one billion people projected to join them in less than five years. For our traditional information and educational Gatekeepers and for traditional bureaucrats, politicians and power mongers, this is fearsome news, indeed. For the rest of us, this is empowerment of a type and kind never before seen or imagined. This is true Democracy.
His conclusions are worth considering:
One point one billion People around the world are on the internet, with another one billion people projected to join them in less than five years. For our traditional information and educational Gatekeepers and for traditional bureaucrats, politicians and power mongers, this is fearsome news, indeed. For the rest of us, this is empowerment of a type and kind never before seen or imagined. This is true Democracy.
... The traditional TV news gatekeepers are now below a nightly audience of 15 million viewers.
Future currency for everyone will be credibility and transparency. Indeed, that is even now becoming the 'currency' for us all. That credibility is predicated upon accountability. If we do not tell the truth, if we do not strive for accuracy in our spoken and written words, we will be held accountable. If we are not willing to accept correction or admit to our mistakes and immediately correct them, we lose credibility.
The future will not be about ideology, ambition or agenda. It will be credibility.
First of all, I share Warren's optimism; we have already seen, in these earliest days of the blogosphere, how falsehoods and outright lies (even when "false but accurate") have been exposed by individuals using their ability to reason and research. Not long ago I predicted that the Anthropomorphic Global Warming alarmists had already lost the mimetic battle (though they didn't know it then, and still don't.) In consonance with Warren's description, the "traditional information and educational Gatekeepers and for traditional bureaucrats, politicians and power mongers," exemplified by the UN, continue to spout alarmist nonsense about AGW. They continue to propose various plans to rescue the planet, all of which would increase the regulatory and tax burden on the successful while enhancing the power of themselves. Yet none of these plans will ever come to fruition.
Eventually, the terror of AGW will be solved by individuals, empowered to make their own choices, who will rapidly adapt new technologies because they will ultimately save them money and, as side effects, increase their resiliency, help clean up the planet, and decrease their dependence on malignant forces.
Yet, along with my optimism resides a soupcon of anxiety. Rapid change can be very frightening for those who do not have the psychological adaptability to embrace such change. The current struggle between Regressive Islam and the Modern World can be traced to the threat that modernity poses to the rigid structure of "medieval" Islamic society. The progression from a culture in which one has status by virtue of fortunate birth (male, Muslim) to a culture which requires and rewards more egalitarian, and very different, fortunate birth attributes (high level problem solving abilities, mental flexibility) is terrifying to those who doubt, or do not have, such requisite abilities.
[The comments to my last post are illustrative.]
One of the connections between the global Left and the Islamists is in their fear of the future, a future in which inequality will, of necessity, increase as those who understand and live on the cutting edge of technology become more and more wealthy and powerful. Their response has been to attack the New World, often parasitically, using our own technology against us. They attack kinetically, with IED's, as well as mimetically, via information warfare. Every day that they do not win, they are losing; they cannot stop progress.
At the same time, there are significant dangers that will arise as small groups and individuals become more and more empowered by our technology. A sufficiently virulent engineered plague or a series of nuclear terror attacks could derail the human race. If enough people become terrified and convinced that Frankenstein is hatching diabolical plans and creating diabolical inventions in his laboratory, the pace of innovation could slow as the Luddites attack. Our freedoms could easily be truncated, though hopefully for only a limited space and time.
We are indeed approaching a Social Singularity, just as much as a Technological Singularity. Humans remain the most adaptable of all creatures. We have nearly immunized ourselves from Nature's traditional imperative to "adapt or die," but it is certainly true that we will all need to adapt or be marginalized.
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