[Foundation-l] Fwd: [Citizendium-l] The world remade

[David Gerard]

None of this should be news to anyone on this list. But I think it's
useful having it all in one place.

Now. How does each of these affect what we do, and what can we do to
do it better in context of increasing public awareness of these facts?


- d.



---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Larry Sanger <sanger-lists at citizendium.org>
Date: 11 Jan 2008 04:13
Subject: [Citizendium-l] The world remade
To: Citizendium general project announcement list
<citizendium-l at lists.purdue.edu>




This is from the Citizendium blog; I thought you mind find this
interesting. --Larry


The world remade
Filed under: Technology, Internet, Theory — Larry Sanger @ 8:09 pm Edit This


A "column."

We now speak incuriously of the many "revolutions" and "paradigm
shifts" we are undergoing.  Yet few people have grasped this fully or
taken it very seriously.  The world is being remade from top to bottom
in the space of a generation.

In the middle of the most dramatic historical changes, people often
fail entirely to understand exactly how momentous the events around
them are–or, as with many of us at present, they understand that
dramatic changes are taking place, but they don't quite grasp their
nature.  Sometimes we comment casually, reducing radical mutations of
society to mere slogans and acronyms, as if they were normal events at
which it would be naive to evince shock or wonder.  To try to gain a
wider perspective, it might help for us to list a number of dramatic,
existential changes to the nature of our society.

We have instant communication with people around the world.  I have
e-friends in Australia and France I have never met.  I can flame and
flamed by people in Hong Kong and Brazil.
We have instant communication with strangers we have never met
face-to-face.  We have brand new methods of getting to know these
strangers.
We have instant communication with our friends, families, and
workmates virtually at any moment anywhere anyone is.
Our online communities are wholly different from anything before that
preceded them in several important respects.  Some of us spend many
hours a day working in such communities.
Most of us leave a digital trail accessible to all.  In my case, a
really diligent researcher could construct a nearly day-by-day account
of my doings based on what I have said online in various places.
Among other things, this radically changes the nature of our public
identity and reputation.
Even more of us leave a less-accessible digital trail that,
increasingly, is allowing authorities to conduct searches about us
that are more "invasive" than most home invasions would be.
This is because, for many of us, our entire lives are becoming
digitized.  Consider how many aspects of our lives, in past
generations nonexistent or totally analog, are now part of digital
networks: telephone (cell especially); television (cable and satellite
especially); Internet reading (websites and, if Kindle takes off,
books as well); e-mail, blog, and other online communication; music
(esp. MP3 services); library use; credit card use; etc.
In time, all these networks will be centrally organized, purely for
our convenience.  From single entry-point devices like the iPhone
we'll be able access every aspect of our lives that is mediated by a
network.  This in turn will make surveillance only easier.
"The Establishment" — older people and traditionalists — may not be
the "force" in online society that it could be.  But the current
plugged-in younger generations are growing up.  When they are grown
up, what will the world look like when the full wealth and authority
of The Establishment is online?
Increasingly, people who are really plugged in are having to choose
actively to see people face-to-face.  It's now clichéd that technology
brings us together, but it also drives us apart — but this will only
become more strikingly true.  For some of us I think it's already a
serious problem, and for the world dominated by Generation Y, it will
be even more so.  There must be interesting solutions in the offing
(and I don't mean MeetUps) to the problem of how to bring a totally
digital, wired society together in meatspace.  (Think in this
connection of the Freemasons and their secrets.)
Increasingly, for many of people online, many of our most significant
relationships are made online, not as part of offline groups such as
school, church, and work.  How could this fail to have revolutionary
effects?
Free collaborative digital encyclopedias will unify all of credible,
general human knowledge into one central knowledge base, endorsed, in
time, by powerful universities and publishers.  Whatever projects
manage to do this authoritatively and exhaustively will be
tremendously influential.  If they aren't justly governed–maybe even
if they are–beware.
All books, journals, and archives will, in time, be digitized and
brilliantly searchable, cutting research time to a small fraction of
what it used to be.  It is only a matter of time before the entire
contents of all the world's libraries and archives will be accessible
in a minimal amount of time from anywhere–but not necessarily by
anyone.  (Access fees could be a major front in the political battle
for equality in the 21st century.)
We can find and buy anything, almost any item of merchandise, in a
matter of minutes from anywhere, and have it shipped almost anywhere.
Culture is now fully and rapidly portable.  The language, religion,
mass media, arts, etc., of every advanced society on Earth are online,
and will become even more so.  I learned Irish traditional music in
Ohio, Alaska, Russia – and occasionally Ireland – largely because of
the Internet.  Madagascar band Tarika can sell their music instantly
to people in Hawaii.  How will this change traditions?  How will it
change how we socialize?

I could go on, of course.  I might have left out what you think will
be the biggest change worked by our digital networks.  These are not
merely technological changes, not merely new gizmos and business
plans.  They are in fact deep existential changes — they are changes
in how we live, love, work, study, research, shop, waste time, act
together, and even fight.

Few of us have begun to understand quite how these changes, together,
are utterly remaking the world before our very eyes.  The impact of
these changes together will utterly dwarf the changes worked by the
electric light, the telephone, the automobile, the transistor, and the
pre-Internet personal computer.  The world at the close of 2007 is
quite different from 1907 or 1957, but will be completely different,
something enormously foreign to the pre-Internet world, in 2057.  I
invite you to think of that not as industry hype but as a serious
proposition, something to be excited, or concerned, about.  The
changes worked by the Internet will be recognized as by far the most
important changes in history, rivalled only by the inventions of
language, writing, and the printing press.  Quite possibly more
important than the rise of the Greek rationalism and democracy, the
spread of classical culture via the Roman Empire, the Christianization
of Europe, the nation state, the scientific method, modern egalitarian
democracy, the industrial revolution, totalitarianism, and
globalization.

I only hope that we will like what our world changes into.  I only
hope we will be able to anticipate the horror scenarios, and act to
avoid them.  Society has not always been good at anticipating the
disastrous effects of revolutions; few understood at the time that the
Russian Revolution and the election of Hitler could have such
devastating effects, with tens of millions dead in wars, genocides,
and purges, and Europe essentially destroyed. History could have gone
differently; it often takes just one individual insisting strongly on
a different course of action, and the world will be (or would have
been) radically different, and perhaps better.  We as a global society
will be faced with innumerable choices in our lifetimes, as we remake
the world, or as it is remade for us.

I hope we'll be choosing wisely, our generation.

Surely many of us know this much now: we are in the middle of a
revolution, and that's not hype, it's not just "technology news," it's
sobering fact.  If so, then I propose that we have a duty to think
about these helter-skelter changes, and, as we do on wikis, boldly
take responsibility as citizens of the world.  I think we as a society
should be studying this revolution more than any other current event;
and I think that newspapers (and Google News) should have special
daily sections: "The Digital Revolution."  This is, to my mind, the
biggest news that affects our present and future lives, far bigger
than the Iraq War, bigger than the U.S. presidential elections,
probably bigger than global warming.  The fact that we are paying so
much attention to those relative trivialities will look silly to
future scholars.  We, many of us, are sleepwalking through the biggest
societal earthquake since the invention of the printing press.

So I have questions for you: how else is our world being remade?  What
did I leave off of the list above?  What do you think will prove to be
the most dramatic, the most consequential of these changes?  What
policies, what philosophies, should guide us as we develop these
social technologies?  What are the worst case scenarios we should fear
and act to prevent?
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